A high stress culture with no work life balance
Pros
Few and far between. There are/were good lecturers who are professional and dedicated, but without those key staff holding it together, it's a fight to want to be there.
Cons
There is a total lack of support and respect for teaching staff. An unreasonable and, at times, overwhelming workload for lecturers has resulted in exhaustion for so many. I’ve never worked with a teaching staff that has collectively taken so many sick days due to extreme fatigue and burnout. Lecturers are required to be on-site five days a week with no opportunity to work from home during teaching terms. Expect to teach 20+ hours a week, in addition to having every free minute taken up by completing a plethora of administrative tasks, module meetings, CPD sessions, student reports, responding to emails, curriculum development, marking, providing feedback for formative and summative assessments, and on top of that, being expected to be on standby to cover lessons on a daily basis. This results in lecturers not having adequate time to prepare for lessons and ending up having to take work home in order to keep up with the workload. The ‘offices’ are converted classrooms which are out-dated, open-planned and poorly furnished. They serve as grim backdrop for the following systemic problems which include: unfair workload distribution, unfair pay and poor student attendance. There is a serious lack of steadfast rules that can be implemented and applied to students which have concrete repercussions for poor attendance, poor grades, failing, not handing in work, etc. As things stand, even the students who never attend classes can still qualify to write exams, fail, rewrite, and fail again, but then be bumped up to pass. Needless to say, a number of tutors and key staff have grown disillusioned and left. This surely is not a sustainable business model in HE? Holidays are stingy; this is something students have complained about at length. There are no proper breaks between terms. There are no holidays for teachers between Easter and September. Middle Management is encouraged to document and report back to the higher-ups, resulting in teachers feeling uneasy in offices and spied on. Fixed-term and zero-hour contracts mean teaching staff are dispensable and never invested in, resulting in high teacher turnover which is not sustainable. The demands placed upon module leads are totally unacceptable. Beware and know what you're getting yourself into BEFORE you sign that fixed term / zero hours contract.
