The article below talks about the dangerous levels of workloads in the University sector at the moment, and reports from our last branch meeting on last Wednesday 8th January 2020 showed the extent to which this is an issue at Coventry University. There is no doubt that workloads are increasing but this has been hugely exacerbated by the New Academic Year, which UCU consistently opposed as detrimental to staff well-being, student well-being and to the ‘student experience’ as a whole. What this did was required all the teaching and marking in the first semester to be prior to Christmas. For so many staff this meant they spent the last two weeks of term having to mark at an exhausing pace, with many reporting at the branch meeting that they spent much of their Christmas break finishing off what they hadn’t been able to do in term time. On the 20th of January the teaching for the second semester starts again, and the teaching and assessment period is again taking place within a dangerously small space. This year Exam Boards are held in May, instead of June as they were last year. When Ian Dunn from the Senior Leadership team introduced the New Academic Year he told UCU that this was “all about the student experience”. But what this means is that students work is squeezed into a much smaller time period – how is that in their interests as learners? And for staff this means marking, moderation and external assessment times are also required within these smaller time periods. Have you as a member of staff attended one of the meetings held by Senior Leadership Team about the New Academic Year? You might be excused for thinking you were living in a paralell universe as according to the people leading these meetings everything is going wonderfully. We would reiterate our really serious concern for student and staff well-being with the increasing pressure teaching staff are being placed under.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/uk-academia-increasingly-unsafe-working-environment