Cardiff University may retain Nursing School, despite cuts
Martin Shipton
Cardiff University is considering a proposal that would see Nursing retained as a taught subject, Vice Chancellor Wendy Larner has told staff.
In January the university announced plans for 400 job cuts and the closure of five o/f its Schools, including Nursing and Music.
The proposal has met bitter resistance from academic staff belonging to the University and College Union, who have voted overwhelmingly for strike action.
‘Alternative proposal’
In a letter headed “Our Academic Future” sent to all members of staff at the university on April 10, Professor Larner states: “There is an alternative proposal for nursing that would see us retain adult, child and mental health nursing, albeit recruiting smaller numbers of undergraduates. The proposal focuses on improving the student experience and thus the progression through the degree programmes, ensuring that as many well-trained graduates join the NHS programme as possible at the end of their degree.
“We will be looking to broaden the routes into that degree programme to ensure widening participation, potentially by adding a foundation year. Acceptance of this alternative proposal is contingent on securing approval from Welsh Government, the NHS and Health Education and Improvement Wales – and this is complex because what we do affects the NHS workforce across Wales – but we are hopeful that we can arrive at a solution that safeguards nursing provision at Cardiff.”
Consultation
The letter also states: “When we passed the mid-way point of the Our Academic Future consultation, we agreed with our trade unions that we would hold two further review points, before the end of the consultation, when we would look at the situation for each Academic School, with a view to removing colleagues from scope wherever that was possible.
“Today is the first of those review points and following consultation with trade unions we have been able to remove colleagues from the School of Chemistry, and the School of Mathematics, from the in-scope pool. This means that staff within those Schools are no longer at risk of redundancy. We are also pausing consideration of voluntary redundancy applications in the School of Healthcare Sciences, where nursing staff are in-scope of the consultation.
“Alternative proposals have played an important role in changing the status of these Academic Schools. Schools have put forward adaptations for the proposals which see us achieving the same outcomes, within the same timeframe, in slightly different ways. For Chemistry, we have accepted the School’s proposal to retain the Medicinal Chemistry programme.
“For Mathematics, there is a very interesting proposal for a new programme that can widen participation in the School. For both Schools, we have reviewed the undergraduate home targets, confident that we can still hold tariff with increased numbers. Our agreement in Kazakhstan also requires input from Mathematics colleagues, meaning that the reduction in FTE that we were looking to achieve is smaller.
“We are continuing to review alternative proposals every week, and Pro Vice-Chancellors are giving verbal feedback to those who submit them. The process is iterative and we are in dialogue with Heads of School and staff across the university.
“Removing Mathematics and Chemistry from scope of the consultation means that there is now a total of 1307 staff in the in-scope pool, reduced from 1807 at the start of the consultation. We have had 81 staff apply for and be accepted for voluntary redundancy to date, meaning that alongside approved voluntary severance applications we are on course to make 114 Full Time Equivalent(FTE) reductions. This means we are now proposing to reduce academic FTE numbers by 286, rather than 400 we started with at the beginning of the consultation.
“The voluntary redundancy scheme will close on 6 May and we continue to receive applications. There is help and advice available for staff who want to consider this option- please do get in touch with your HR business partner for a confidential conversation.
“We have also launched our temporary flexible working scheme and our temporary leave annual purchase scheme recently – these will help to create further financial headroom.
“I know that this remains a really difficult period for many of our staff. Some of you are very understandably worried about the future; even those of you who are no longer at risk will be feeling a range of emotions. Please do seek support which is available to you and included at the bottom of this message. I want to reiterate – these are proposals.
“As we’ve seen this week, they can and they should change. This community has so many good ideas, and you can all help us to shape the future direction of this university.”
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To highlight the serious and obvious underfunding of our universities Wendy Larner is playing a political game. The problem with such political games is that people are caught up in them. People suffer stress, anxiety, depression – consequently their health deteriorates. Peoples’ health is too high a price to pay for Wendy’s political games!
People’s health would also suffer if the decline was allowed to continue with regular job losses every few months for years until the university was diminished beyond all recognition and kicked out of the Russell Group. But perhaps those counting the months until retirement couldn’t care less about the institution’s long-term survival as long they’re ok.
Surely nursing is a vocational rather than academic course so would be better transferred to USW.
Wendy is doing a “Trump”! Announce the worst scenario then roll back a bit and everyone (not everyone obviously) breathes a small sigh of relief.
This is rather smoke and mirrors. University Management have announced a reduction in targeted cuts by the number of people who have applied for redundancy or severance. They have not reduced the original target of 400 by the 20-30 roles they’ve taken out of scope, plus the freeze on Nursing. It looks like those roles will now be take from those 1300 who still remain in scope for redundancy. So, they are still ploughing on with this target of 400, despite any ‘alternative plans’.