Nearly 100 university staff 'fear losing job'

Keele University said it was not proposing to close any subject areas

Nearly 100 staff at a university are spending their Christmas break in fear they will be losing their job in the new year, a union said.

Keele UCU (University and College Union) said the Staffordshire institution has proposed a plan for compulsory redundancies, which could mean 30 to 35 teaching and research staff will lose their job in 2025.

It added the schools of Humanities and Social Sciences would be the most heavily affected, with up to 24 going.

Keele University said universities were under severe financial strain and it was consulting with colleagues who would be potentially affected by proposals to reduce staffing levels.

Job losses would happen across four schools, including Keele Business School and Allied Health Professions and Pharmacy, Keele UCU stated.

It added there were "serious questions about the quality of teaching and experience that students will get after so many teaching staff are culled".

The university was running a voluntary redundancy scheme until January and had said if not enough choose to take it, a process for selecting staff for compulsory redundancies would start in March, according to the union.

'Safeguarding student experience'

In a statement, the university said the whole sector in the UK was under severe financial strain, "largely because tuition fees were not increased to keep up with inflation for almost a decade".

It added international student recruitment had become increasingly unreliable partly because of the government policy on visas.

It added shifts in what people wanted to study, and where, meant in some of its subject areas there were not enough students to sustain the level of academic staff employed.

As such, it was consulting with colleagues who would be potentially affected by proposals "to reduce staffing levels in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences".

The university said: "We are not proposing to close any subject areas at Keele and any reductions would still maintain favourable ratios of staff to students, thus safeguarding the student experience."