Jess Harris

Australian university staff now in chaos: No idea what will happen after December 31

Imagine not knowing whether your job will exist after the holidays. The anxiety of wondering whether you should be budgeting for a well-deserved break with family or for the impending bills that might not be accounted for by your current salary in the new year. This is a reality for so many people working in Australian universities right now.

I only have a contract until December 31. I have no idea what will happen after that.”

Released in February, the final report of the Universities Accord highlighted multiple crisis points for the Australian tertiary education sector. That includes inadequate funding, poor governance, wage thefts and a massive over reliance on casual staff. For people within the sector, this report provided some confirmation of their experience. The recommendations provided a small sliver of hope that we might see some change.

The Ending Bad Governance for Good report released by the NTEU last week paints an even more dire picture, while thousands of academics are facing uncertainty about whether they will have work in 2025.

Confusion over casualisation

The final report of the Universities Accord indicated that high rates of precarious employment in the sector negatively impacts the quality of teaching and research within universities, limiting the overall workforce capacity. The report cites data showing that over the past 30 years, rates of casual employment have consistently sat between 15.8% and 22.8% of all university staff.

These types of proportional data, however, report on Full Time Equivalent (FTE) positions. That obscure the actual number of people who are precariously employed. Estimates of the number of casually employed individuals vary wildly. There are suggestions that one FTE could really represent between 7 and 16 employees.

The recent NTEU report uses a conservative estimate of 6 people for every FTE role. That raises the overall proportion of individuals who are casually employed to an average of 49% across Australian universities. That’s nearly half of all employees

Moves to reduce the reliance on casual work are welcome – but they have also left institutions in a state of confusion. Universities are currently scrambling to respond to changes in the classification of casual work. The Fair Work Commission’s “Closing the Loopholes” Act involves a range of changes to strengthen the protection of employees. That includes changing the definition of casual employment and the process of conversion to permanent employment.

Approaches vary

Approaches have varied across the sector. But people who have worked at institutions for years or decades are now facing uncertainty about what their roles might look like in the new year or whether their much-needed positions will continue to exist.   

My research over the past eight years with colleagues focuses on the experiences of academics in insecure employment. We see an emerging sense of precarity throughout the sector that extends beyond those who are employed casually. Impacts of the COVID pandemic, reports of hundreds of millions of dollars in staff underpayment and other forms of wage theft, and multiple rounds of restructuring and redundancies contributes to a sense of unease across university campuses.

A crisis of governance

Adding to this unease, the new NTEU report paints a damning picture of university governance.

Neoliberal policies and reduced government funding ensure universities are now seen as businesses. 

But the NTEU report includes shocking examples of management practices that would not be accepted in the business world.

The report describes inflated executive salaries. Over 300 university executives nationally being paid more than the premiers of their respective states. More than $730M was paid to external consultants and contractors in 2023 alone.

This figure seems incomprehensible within a sector that promotes itself as having the ‘best and brightest’ within their own walls. While I note that the amount reported can include other professional services, it does not paint a substantially different picture from the Sydney Morning Herald’s report in 2023.

The NTEU report shows, on average, the 37 Australian public universities examined have paid external consultants almost $20M in one year ($19,836,011). Simultaneously, they are undergoing restructures and cutting programs. They are also cutting staff, who are dedicated to the core business of teaching and research, in precarious positions.

Changing landscapes of academic employment

Between 2020 and 2023, the number of job losses and newly added positions has bounced around dramatically, bolstering the NTEU report’s finding of poor workforce planning.

Over the period of peak COVID-19 pandemic, 4,760 people were made redundant within Australian universities. While 75% of these positions have been readvertised since 2021, universities across the country have announced impending redundancies and some have recently cut entire programs.

At the same time, universities are declaring their commitment to de-casualising their workforce. Our current research examines policies which relate to the shift away from casual employment to permanency

within Enterprise Bargaining Agreements from 35 Australian Universities. We found 27 universities have committed to creating new positions targeting the conversion of a minimum of 2,554 FTE casual positions to permanent roles. A fraction of the public funding spent on consultancy alone would be sufficient to fund these positions.

Universities are complex. Workforce planning is particularly complex in a sector that is governed by student numbers. One issue within the sector, however, is clear. 

A sense of precarity

All academics, regardless of their employment contracts, are feeling a sense of precarity. They are uncertain about their roles, their workload, and the future of the sector.

People who are currently wondering about their employment beyond next month are receiving reports that huge amounts of public funding has been spent on executive salaries and external consultants.

My hope is that public funding for higher education is committed to supporting those who teach our future doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, and nurses. My hope is that funding is dedicated to supporting researchers who engage in cutting edge research and providing training and employment for future researchers to do the same.

Jess Harris is an associate professor in the School of Education at the University of Newcastle. Her research is focused on the leadership and development of teachers and teaching within schools and through initial teacher education. She draws on a range of qualitative research methods, including conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis.

Want fairness at uni now? There’s one crucial thing the minister forgot

Quality of higher education, equity of participation and access are front and centre in the new Universities Accord interim report, released by Education Minister Jason Clare at the National Press Club on Wednesday.

Minister Clare described five key priority areas for immediate action – three of which directly related to equity. In contrast to increasing equity and fairness for students, there was limited mention of university staff and the levels of casualisation in the sector, aside from calling for universities to become “exemplary employers”.

What are the five key priorities?

The first priority action recommends extending access to higher education by creating more Regional University Centres. In response, the federal government has committed to doubling the number of existing hubs, creating a further 20 centres in regional locations and 14 in the outer-suburban areas of major cities.

The second priority action recommends abolishing the 50% pass rule which was introduced under the former government’s Job Ready Graduates Package. The government has committed to removing this rule, which has disproportionately affected students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Professor Barney Dalgarno from the University of Canberra said that many of these students can excel in their studies, when given appropriate support from academics.

The third priority action seeks to ensure all First Nations students are eligible for a guaranteed funded place at university. In 2021 such a guarantee was introduced for First Nations students from regional and remote Australia, and the government has agreed to applying this guarantee nationwide. 

The fourth priority action recommends extending the Covid-era Higher Education Continuity Guarantee for 2024 and 2025. The government has agreed to this to allow funding certainty to universities as the Accord process rolls out.

Finally, the fifth priority action seeks to improve university governance with a focus on employment practices, student and staff safety, and the make-up of university governance bodies.

Equity is about more than aspirations

Investment in higher education is an investment in young people and in our future as a nation. As Minister Clare pointed out in his address, that investment needs to start in our early childhood education and continue through our school sector. He rightly treats the education landscape as an interconnected jigsaw puzzle.

However, too often the question of equity becomes one of raising aspirations. The interim report focuses on “increasing aspiration” and the need to “develop the aspirations of potential students”. However, we know from research that students from all backgrounds aspire to university and careers that require higher education qualifications. The final report of the Accord working group must focus on how we remove barriers that not only limit access to university for students from diverse backgrounds and target equity groups, but also support their success once they arrive on our campuses.

University staff are key to realising the Accord’s ambitions

A big gap in the Accord’s interim report is concrete action on improving employment conditions at universities. The Accord report rightly acknowledges the rife casualisation across the sector, noting that 69% of teaching is conducted by casual staff members. While the report notes that casual employment can suit both employer and employees, a 2019 survey conducted by NTEU showed that 82% of casual staff would prefer part-time or full-time ongoing employment. 

My research, with colleagues from QUT, Charles Sturt University and the United Kingdom, has identified that casualisation of teaching and short-term contract research gigs disproportionately impact women, people from diverse backgrounds and early career researchers. Lengths of precarity can limit career opportunities through reduced ability to obtain professional development or career planning. Some casuals have held the same roles for decades and yet aren’t considered eligible for conversion to ongoing roles.

The Accord recognises that recent staff underpayments are “patently unacceptable” for a public institution but must go further to ensure that everyone in academic work is paid for the time they spend on supporting student learning and engaging in high quality research.

Casual teaching staff are only paid for their time on class and limited time for marking assignments. They are not currently paid for their time engaging in professional development or providing additional supports for students, both of which are recommendations within the Accord. These situations leave many academics with the impossible choice of providing the levels of support that they know students need and just focusing on what they are paid to do. Universities know this and exploit the care and dedication of their staff. 

More consistent funding is required for universities to ‘de-casualise’ and ensure that the knowledge and skills of high-quality lecturers and researchers are acknowledged, retained and enhanced.

A vision for high quality teaching and research

Consideration of the employment conditions in Australian universities is critical if the vision laid out in the Accord interim report is to be achieved. It describes a vision for 2035 of a more equitable system that supports all Australians, who choose to go to university, to study in supportive environments that foster high quality teaching and research. 

The interim report acknowledges that this vision and “the sector’s success in delivering skills, knowledge and equity is underpinned by enduring and stable funding and governance architecture”. The potential risks of continuing such high levels of casualisation in higher education are clearly illustrated in the issues currently playing out in UK universities, reminding us that “staff working conditions are student learning conditions”.

Jess Harris is an associate professor in the School of Education at the University of Newcastle. Her research is focused on the leadership and development of teachers and teaching within schools and through initial teacher education. She draws on a range of qualitative research methods, including conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis.

Image of Jason Clare at the National Press Club from video on his Facebook page.

Why we should ditch metrocentricity now (and read about a new book too)

We are coming to the end of the conference but still happy to take blogs about papers you heard and papers you’ve given. I’m on jenna@aare.edu.au

Sally Patfield, Senior Research Fellow, Teachers and Teaching Research Centre, School of Education, The University of Newcastle writes on the Rural Education Symposium

Knowledge and rurality: Deconstructing geographic narcissism in education

Philip Roberts, Natalie Downes, Jenny Dean, Kristy O’Neill, Samantha McMahon, Jo-Anne Reid, Laurie Poretti, Ada Goldsmith

Approximately 7 million people – or 28% of the Australian population – live in rural and remote areas across the country. Rural communities are unique and diverse, not only in terms of geography and demographics, but also in terms of the emotional and material realities of residents’ lives, framed within the interrelated context of the local and the global.

We’re all used to hearing the phrase ‘educational disadvantage’; it’s rolled out repeatedly to capture and conceptualise the apparent education achievement gap between rural students and their metropolitan peers. Particularly when it comes to standardised tests like NAPLAN, it’s a well-worn narrative that the achievement gap between rural and urban students is persistent and widening.

This symposium turned this narrative on its head by interrogating the metro-centric bias inherent within curriculum, educational institutions like schools and universities, and even within academia itself. It re-frames how we think of the ‘problem’ by asking: ‘what, and whose, knowledge is valued?’ And: ‘what if its not rural students who are failing to perform, but rather, the education system which is failing rural communities by marginalising the perspectives of the rural?”

The four papers presented within this symposium weaved together a powerful argument that challenges the way we think about the very nature of ‘educational disadvantage’ by questioning existing practices and illustrating the important role rural knowledges and ways of being can play for young people, their families, and the future of their communities. 

Each paper provided a different layer of insight and analysis: granular case studies that demonstrate how schools are already integrating rural knowledges into curriculum enactment; large-scale analyses of achievement data which examine how school location influences senior secondary outcomes; an examination of the experiences of rural students in higher education, focusing in particular on notions of belonging; and finally, questioning the way research may (perhaps inadvertently at times) even (re)produce deficit notions of the rural, marginalising different ways of knowing, being and doing beyond the metropolis.

The first three presentations brought to the fore key issues around the ideas of spatiality, inequality and knowledge production: that is, that rural space has a reality and, relatedly, that rurality is “reality producing”. In this way, the presenters clearly demonstrated how notions of space and place are central to both the maintenance and representation of social difference.

Overall, this symposium challenges us to think about how we define and engage with the rural – both as educators and researchers. In the third presentation, Natalie Downes and colleagues sadly showed how rural university students see rurality as misrecognised and misrepresented in their coursework and curriculum, with rural locations and careers portrayed as problematic – places associated with staff shortages and a lack of opportunity, for example. Unfortunately, rural students reported that the way rurality was depicted not only impacted how they felt at university but also once they returned home to their communities. Clearly there is much more to do to transform how we embed rural knowledges and promote rural careers across higher education degrees.

In the fourth presentation, the stark reality of how rurality is commonly portrayed was again emphasised, with the presenters highlighting that the fact that far too many projects do not engage with the complexities of rurality in definition nor in analysis, often just mentioning ‘the rural’ in passing as the site of the research. The authors made the case that context matters in education research and how we position and work alongside rural communities plays an important role in either perpetuating or dismantling longstanding hierarchies of power and knowledge.

COMMUNITY MATTERS BOOK LAUNCH by Naomi Barnes

On Wednesday, the AARE Local/Global Issues in Education book series launched Community Matters: The Complex Links Between Community and Young People’s Aspirations for Higher Education by Jennifer Gore, Sally Patfield, Leanne Fray and Jess Harris. 

The book explores the complex meanings of community, the pressure young people face to attend university, access to higher education, university aspirations in rural communities, and understanding why community matters when young people express a desire to attend university. 

In reading an excerpt, Gore described how the book was about how “community helps to soften blunt equity categories and remind researchers, policy makers and equity practitioners of the human conditions that mediate the gap between important analytical categories that undergird important social justice efforts”.

The book is due to be published on 30 December 2022

Community Matters: The Complex Links Between Community and Young People’s Aspirations for Higher Education offers a new lens on equity of access. The policy focus, nationally and globally, on widening participation for under-represented target groups too readily treats such groups as if they have a singular voice, a singular history, and a singular set of concerns. Drawing on the perspectives of Australian school students, their parents/carers, teachers, and a vast array of residents from seven diverse communities, this book uses the lens of ‘community’ to reframe inequitable access. It does so by recognising the complex social and cultural forces at play locally that shape how young people form and articulate their post-school futures.

How our messy research journey survived floods, fires and COVID19

See this presentation in real time today (December 2, 2021) in the Schools and Education Systems SIG at 10am

Large research trials are complex and difficult to manage at the best of times. At AARE 2021 this week, around 900 papers have been presented, many reporting clean and tidy findings from research studies. Twenty minutes doesn’t provide enough time to tell the full story.

And it’s not one that researchers are encouraged to tell.

I want to use my experience as the project manager of the largest randomised controlled trial in Australian education research history to expose the messy, unpredictable, challenging, and at times down-right insane rollercoaster of conducting school-based research.

In 2018, the Teachers and Teaching Research Centre was awarded $17.1M in funding from the Paul Ramsay Foundation to undertake a comprehensive and rigorous program of research examining the impact of Quality Teaching Rounds (QTR) on teacher and student outcomes.

Our massive, four-arm randomised controlled trial began in 2019 and is in the throes of final data collection right now. Over the past three years we have had to contend with several catastrophes of epic proportions including the Black Summer Bush Fires, state-wide flooding, a global pandemic followed by the local Delta outbreak. 

Now throw in a touch more flooding, and a teachers’ strike to boot.

And yet, despite these challenges, we have (just about) successfully completed this research, gathered incredible amounts of data and published ground-breaking findings. We’ve also learned lessons about the realities of school-based research that I believe would be valuable to share.

We set out in 2018 to recruit 200 NSW government primary schools, with four teachers from each to participate in this research trial. Our first major challenge was recruiting schools. When baseline data collection began in Terms 1 and 2 2019, we had just 125 schools. This necessitated a split-cohort design, with a second cohort of 80 schools planned for 2020.

To manage the huge scale of baseline and follow-up data collection we built up our team of research assistants to more than 50. We almost made it through the follow-up data collection in Term 4 2019 when catastrophic bushfires broke out throughout NSW. 20 of our research schools were closed, which meant constant reshuffling of school visits and monitoring bushfire locations to ensure the safety of our research assistants. Remarkably, we were able to collect data from 124 of 125 schools.

The bushfires continued to hamper our efforts into the start of 2020 as we finalised cohort 2 recruitment and prepared for baseline data collection. Adding to the emergency situation, the fires were followed by significant flooding across many parts of regional NSW, again affecting a number of our research schools (one school was literally wiped off the map).

We’d almost completed baseline data collection for cohort 2 when, in March 2020, COVID-19 forced state-wide school closures. The decision was made to postpone the trial to 2021. However, with the baseline data already collected and comparable control group data from the previous year, we were uniquely positioned to repurpose the data to complete one of the world’s earliest empirical studies on the effects of COVID-19 on student learning

We maintained strong relationships with our research schools throughout this incredibly challenging year and, with support from the NSW Department of Education, we were able to get follow-up data to see what, if any, impact COVID had on student achievement.

As a strong sign of support for our work, most of the 2020 schools signed up again to participate in 2021. Everything started smoothly, baseline data were collected, teachers participated in QTR, then Delta hit on the eve of the Term 2 holidays.

Despite an entire term of remote learning, we are back in the 80 schools right now collecting follow up data. Changing government health orders over the last few weeks meant asking teachers to collect student data on our behalf, then being able to send research assistants to visit schools after all. It’s meant rapid scaling up and scaling down of our team, organising training and support for teachers, as well as organising logistics for research assistants to visit schools.

It has required incredible flexibility, adaptability and coordination in a very short time period, while COVID continues to impact schools. Next week we’re heading to the last of the schools, though right now we are juggling schedules around the planned industrial action.

Since 2019, 205 schools, 757 teachers and more than 10,000 students have participated in this study. To date we’ve visited schools to collect; 1,102 full lesson observations, more than 45,000 PATs, 15,000 student surveys and 1,700 teacher surveys. We’ve published significant findings and world-leading research.

Conducting research of this scale has required constant evaluation and refinement and has led to several important learnings. 

Research with schools is hard and complex. It’s costly and it’s taxing. Both on workloads and on wellbeing. I think it’s important to recognise that.

Contingency planning is critical. Things will go wrong. We could not have anticipated a global pandemic, but having plans for quickly responding to school closures or emergency situations helps when the unexpected happens.

Effectively navigating institutional constraints and regularly refining processes are essential for work of this scale. Our processes look a lot different now to when we began in 2019.

Stakeholder relationship management is crucial. Ensuring buy in from department executives and funding body representatives, school leaders and teachers – and even research support staff – will help when things invariably go pear-shaped. 

Schools do want to engage in meaningful research. It’s important that the research has explicit links to school priorities, has reasonable expectations of participants, provides access to useful data that schools can engage with and, finally, includes a capacity building dimension for teachers or leaders.

We are blessed to have a supportive funding partner and a significant and rare amount of funding which has enabled us to postpone, restart, repurpose data, and persevere. Research is difficult and it is messy. Learning from experience is important.

Wendy Taggart is the senior project manager in the School of Education, College of Human and Social Futures, University of Newcastle. This work is from a paper co-authored with Jenny Gore, Andrew Miller, Jess Harris and Leanne Fray.