Extraordinary General Meeting – Why we should all care about UCL EASE restructuring proposal

An Emergency General Meeting was held on Friday, 11 July at 13.00 on Zoom to discuss the “Education Administration and Student Experience (EASE)” restructuring of administrative support throughout the university. 

The meeting was open to all UCU members. Although many admin colleagues have been told about EASE most other staff have not had a chance to discuss the proposals.

EASE is a major project that will seriously affect all of us, not least because UCL’s financial planning depends on student fees, recruitment and support. If UCL gets this process wrong it can easily do more harm than good. This process has already begun and is rolling around UCL.

EASE is a centralisation project. It will shift the control, location, resources, and governance of administrative support for teaching from Departments to Faculties.

It is one of a series of ‘service simplification’ centralisation projects for university administration planned over the next two years.

EASE is redefining job descriptions, responsibilities and reporting lines. Many Professional Services staff who were based in a department will be responsible for more than one, cutting them off from academic colleagues.

The stated aim is to make administrative and technical support flexible, ready to deploy in departments short on resources, so that Professional Services staff can, in principle, service smaller departments facing bottlenecks and ‘pinch points’.

Some staff face being downgraded or being made redundant if they won’t accept a lower-paid role. Although at the moment there are not large numbers of redundancies, staff are being moved away from direct support for students towards managing student complaints.

The model presumes that spare capacity will be released by relieving staff from supporting academic colleagues in the department. However this is not matched by the experience of our members. This lost workload will be pushed down onto academic colleagues and other administrators. For many members, EASE appears to be an exercise in cost-cutting.

We have four concerns:

• Concentration of Power: centralisation brings loss of governance, control and oversight by departments, less direct responsiveness, institutional knowledge about local processes, and less response to local needs of staff and students. Resourcing decisions will move from HoDs to Deans.

• No Accountability over Resource Distribution: It will also see struggles for limited resources at faculty level with departments competing for resources. This risks a situation where departments are forced to compete for resources, with the risk that bigger/growing departments will push and smaller departments are squeezed out. The absence of a clear decision process and governance at department level will reduce accountability and transparency.

• Redundancies: In one recent EASE restructuring, 7 Grade 7 posts were replaced with 7 Grade 6 (lower paid) posts. In previous EASE processes, either no redundancies were made or an express commitment to avoid redundancies was made. We are pushing jointly with UNISON and UNITE for similar commitments as each proposal is revealed, but UCL has been slow to agree.

• Uncertainty in Jobs and Workloads: PS staff face uncertainty about what their jobs entail, if they will even have a job in some cases, and also potentially increased workloads, increased responsibilities (without increases in pay), redeployment to an unfamiliar setting and an altered line of reporting. As mentioned earlier, workloads in departments are likely to increase as staff are compelled to drop duties.

For academics, researchers, and teaching staff, for example, this means that requests for support and resources will be decided by faculty. Requests from administrators for task-completion will come from faculty, while requests from academic or PS staff for support will go to faculty (e.g., marking, timetabling, finance requests, events organising, etc). This means minimal flexibility for local needs and minimal understanding of those needs and the best ways to work with them. 

Be prepared for requests for marking completion, for example, to come from faculty officers, and requests related to organising events that are important to your department to compete for attention and resources with other departments in your faculty. And this is just the beginning. Other spheres, like department finance, are to be restructured along the same lines in subsequent waves.

One motion and two amendments were submitted for debate at the meeting. The amended motion was carried and can be found here.

UCL UCU Executive Committee