Academic pay:
a long way to go
Presentation to the Parliamentary University Group
25th May 2004.
Academic pay: a long way to go
“Intellectual capacity is of prime importance to the sector and is underpinned by
universities’ key resource – its staff. Staff are the core element of teaching and
research activities, accounting for 58% of university expenditure. The UK’s future
international reputation in university teaching and research depends on the
successful recruitment, retention, motivation and contribution of high calibre staff”.
Achieving our Vision UUK (1).
Pay is not the only issue influencing whether high calibre academic staff are recruited,
retained, and motivated, but is a crucial one.
For many years there was a view that academic staff would put up with relatively low pay in
return for security of employment and a benign management culture that enabled them to
pursue intellectual knowledge and get great satisfaction from teaching. To what extent that
was ever true is debateable, but in the New University sector it has certainly come to an end.
Rising workloads, extensive casualisation, growing insecurity, rising stress, excessive audit,
and a management crisis culture in too many institutions has largely brought that compact
to an end. To quote one authority:
“Over a 16 year period the pay of academics did not go up in real terms…..at a time
when student staff ratios were increasing rapidly and when the selective funding of
research meant that many academics has less time for research. The compact
between academic staff and the state was broken…..pay has remained the
same….but the compensations have gone. I suspect this is unsustainable.”
Bahram Bekhradnia, Director HEPI (2)
One measure of the pressures this combined cocktail has put on academic staff, in research
commissioned by HEFCE, is the high, and rising level of stress (3). These were especially high
in respect of job security, and in perceived commitment from and to their University. The
serious long-term decline in the unit of resource per student has done untold damage.
Levels of pay
What has happened to academic pay is a matter of record. In 1998, Bett found academic
salaries were significantly lower than public sector or private sector comparators at every
grade from junior researchers to professors
Pay rises since the Bett Report have not kept pace with the comparators suggested in that
report.
No wonder the Prime Minister, no less, said 16 months ago,
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“Fact: University lecturers and professors have seen their pay rise one third as fast as
the rest of the workforce in the past 20 years, and have now fallen behind their main
international competitors”. (4)
International comparisons of academic pay at the time of Bett confirm this is true:
Table 1. International comparisons of academic pay 1998
Country
Salary £ sterling
USA
£56,100
Australia
£39,000
France
£34,500
United Kingdom
£21,800
Turkey
£18,200
The Price of Equality. CSR submissions. NATFHE 2002 (5) drawn from OECD tertiary pay statistics
compared using the OECD Purchasing price index.
Spending per teacher is similarly low, whilst a lower proportion of that spending per teacher
is actually devoted to pay in the UK than most of its main comparators (6).
Even after the Framework Agreement, the starting salary for a full-time university lecturer
will be £24,886, whilst an experienced lecturer on the top increment of the main lecturing
grade will receive £36,546. The average salary for senior /principal lecturers remain some
£6000 below the level recommended by the Bett Report.
The structure of pay
Poor levels of pay for academic staff as a whole are compounded by patterns of
discrimination, especially against women and ethnic minority academic staff.
Bett found that 45% of the New University lecturer workforce are employed on part-time
contracts of whom 85% are employed on hourly paid contracts. In other words 38.2%, or
nearly 2 in 5 of the lecturing staff in New Universities are casual staff who:

Are paid approximately half the hourly rate accorded to permanent full or part-time
staff for equivalent teaching loads with, until the recent agreement, no access to
increments

Have no job security and few other employment rights such as access to university
pension schemes, maternity pay or sick pay – and are especially highly stressed

Generally have much poorer facilities than other staff – their own room on campus,
their own IT access, - and much poorer integration into the work of their
departmental team
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Research by NATFHE, funded by the DfES (7), showed that
“contractual discontinuity and insecurity impacts not only on their personal
circumstances but on their ability to plan ahead, develop and make the most of their
teaching and teaching materials.”
In a current discrimination test case being run by NATFHE, one typical major metropolitan
university was forced to disclose the fact that 40% of the staff it was employing were hourly
paid staff, yet some of the latter were doing more teaching than permanent full time
members of staff for less than half the annual income.
The large-scale abuse of hourly paid staff, who are largely female, goes hand in hand with a
substantial gender pay gap for permanent female staff. Research published jointly by
NATFHE and the Guardian last year showed a gender pay gap for equivalent work of 18 %. (8)
This pay gap is not due to differences in age or subject and is made worse where there is
any element of discretion (appointment, promotion, discretionary increments)
Recent HESA data also illustrate a similar albeit smaller pay gap for ethnic minority staff, and
it is likely that this is made worse where there is any element of discretion. (9)
Bett suggested that this discrimination could be addressed by job evaluation, equal pay
audits, more family friendly policies, and national policies to discourage undue reliance on
casual hourly paid staff. Unfortunately whilst job evaluation should highlight the most
obvious pay discrimination, it will not tackle the discrimination arising from appointments
and promotions, whilst virtually no progress has been made on ending the abuse of casual
staff.
The impact of poor pay on recruitment and retention
University employers certainly believe recruitment and retention problems are mounting.
Their 2004 CSR submission states that unless pay was improved
“the creation and maintenance of a sustainable staff base, needed both to train
professionals for the future and to continue widening access to universities, is likely
to prove extremely difficult.”(10)
These concerns are compounded by evidence that large numbers of academic staff will be
retiring in the next decade.
Poor pay and widening participation – a double whammy for New Universities
JM Consulting undertook research for HEFCE to identify the additional costs that higher
education institutions incur arising from services and activities to recruit, retain and support
non-traditional students. The initial findings highlighted a 31% premium for these additional
costs that current funding arrangements signally fail to deliver. (11)
New Universities and other higher education institutions disproportionately attract nontraditional students, and this trend is likely to be exacerbated by differential top up fees. We
are soon likely to find ourselves in a position where those who most need the best teachers
and the most support, study in those parts of the sector with the highest proportion of
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casually employed staff, the most insecure staff, working with the worst facilities and
increasingly starved of the opportunity to undertake research.
Government pay policy and the Framework Agreement
Government public sector pay policy may be summarised as:

Dismantle or weaken national bargaining

Introduce individual performance links to pay

Emphasis market supplements

Use job evaluation as a means of introducing equal pay
The Framework Agreement concluded this year sought to include all four elements. In
respect of academic pay, NATFHE ’s priority in the negotiations leading to the Agreement
was to oppose or minimise the first three as being both counter productive, and being prone
to discrimination, and to ensure that job evaluation was as closely linked as possible to the
national pay scales. NATFHE is aware of no empirical evidence being provided that an
approach based on fragmentation of national pay bargaining and an increased focus on
individual incentives will improve either individual academic performance of that of the
sector as a whole. Quite the contrary, it runs the risk of being seriously divisive within and
between departments and institutions. As a result we argued, with success that the
Framework Agreement should:

Retain a national pay scale with a means of linking job evaluation outcomes in a
consistent way to a national grading structure

Restrict contribution points to the top of each pay grade and avoids them becoming
performance related pay

Set very clear equality criteria for market supplements
Our insistence on minimising local discretion was driven by a determination to oppose
anything that would increase discrimination in pay in the sector. There is clear evidence that
local discretion in public sector pay increases gender and race discrimination. For that
reason we also prioritised improving the pay of hourly paid staff.
What the Framework Agreement does not do is close the serious pay shortfall identified by
Bett. Staff will receive:

6.5% over two years

1.2% extra on average through assimilation to the new pay scales
In addition, some staff will receive

Upgradings due to job evaluation (total increase 3-5%)

Discretionary contribution points
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
Market supplements
The one significant improvement is that hourly paid staff will be placed on grades and
receive increments for the first time, though they will still receive approximately half the pay
for the equivalent teaching undertaken by permanent staff.
No such restraints were applied to Vice Chancellors and Principals, many of whom (though
not all) stuck to their previous year’s salary motto of “don’t do what I do, do what I say” and
received pay increases last year almost double (again) that received by their academic staff –
on average 6.1% (13).
At the time of writing, it is too early to reach conclusions about the final outcome of the
implementation of the Framework Agreement, but already NATFHE has expressed serious
concerns that too many institutions seem unprepared for implementation, are obsessed with
local “variations”, or are simply unwilling to fully fund the Agreement (14).
Funding and pay
University employers say they share our goals of substantial increases in academic pay. The
obstacle is the cost. For example, UUK and SCOP claim (15) that:

The cost of the pay modernisation agenda alone will be £602 millions.

If the widening participation premium is to reach the 31% identified by HEFCE that
will cost £254 millions.

Simply maintaining the current, wholly inadequate unit of funding for universities and
HE colleges requires additional recurrent expenditure of £568 millions HEFCE
Continuing failure to provide this funding will impact directly on staff pay, numbers
and effectiveness. Reliance on differential top up fees and endowments to close the
gap will compound inequality and leave those students most in need of support getting
the least.
What can PUG do?
Firstly, it could press the Secretary of State for firm, urgent, commitments to finally
implement Bett’s recommendations on both pay levels and measures to tackle the excessive
reliance on, and abuse of, hourly paid staff.
Secondly it could insist on tighter monitoring than that proposed to scrutinise whether the
new pay arrangements increase or decrease discrimination in the sector
Thirdly, it could press the Secretary of State for commitments to find the specific funding in
respect of pay modernisation, widening participation and prevention of any further
deterioration in the unit of funding.
Fourthly it could press the Secretary of State to put on hold plans to further concentrate
research which demoralise New University staff in particular and undermine high quality
teaching drawing on good research
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To paraphrase, the current situation is unsustainable.
This briefing was prepared by NATFHE in May 2004 as a presentation to the
Parliamentary University Group. For more information please contact Roger Kline,
Head of Universities Department, NATFHE on rkline@natfhe.org.uk
References
1.Achieving our Vision. UUK CSR submission. 2004
2.20 years of higher education policy in the United Kingdom: Looking back 10 years and forward to the next
decade. Bahram Bekhradnia, Director Higher Education Policy Institute, in Ten years on: changing higher education
in a changing world.
3. Occupational stress in Higher Education study – Version II. Michelle Tytherleigh and colleagues. Plymouth
University Three year ongoing study for HEFCE 2003. See www.ihs.plymouth.ac.uk/%7Estresshe
4. Tony Blair: Speech at South Camden Community College 23.01.03
5. The Price of Equality. CSR submission from NATFHE 2002.
6. Ibid.
7. In from the Cold: Part-time teaching, professional development and the ILT. See also Casualisation and Quality
Anand Chitnis and Gareth Williams1999 Centre for Higher Education Studies for NATFHE. NATFHE 2001
8. The Guardian, 27.05.04.
9. Higher Education Statistics Agency data 2001-02. Hence NATFHE’s response to HEFCE 2004/16, HEFCE’s
monitoring of the Race Relations Amendment Act, in which we called for much more rigorous monitoring of the race
impact of the Framework agreement.
10. Achieving our vision. UUK. 2004
11. Quoted in Achieving our vision (op cit)
12. Times Higher Education Supplement 21.05.05 drawn from HESA figures for 2001-02
13. Times Higher Education Supplement 20.02.04
14. Times Higher Education Supplement 04.06.2004.
15. UUK: Achieving our vision and SCOP: Sustainability for success – both Comprehensive Spending Review
submissions 2004.
About NATFHE
NATFHE – The University and Colleges Lecturers’ Union – has 67,000 members. It is the
professional association and trade union for lecturers, researchers and managers throughout
adult, further and higher education.
NATFHE may be contacted at 27, Britannia Street, London WC1X 9JP, or at
hedepartment@natfhe.org.uk or at www.natfhe.org.uk
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