This letter was sent by Kingston UCU on 27th January to David Mackintosh (chair of JNCC) and Andy Kent (Dean of HSCE) in response to shocking treatment of staff in the Faculty of Health, Social Care and Education:

Dear David and Andy,

We are writing to you as JNCC Chair and Dean of the Faculty of HSCE demanding that you take immediate action to protect the health and wellbeing of our colleagues in the faculty of HSCE. We have received alarming reports from colleagues who feel that senior managers are putting undue pressure on staff to return to face-to-face teaching, this despite current government advice and staff presenting very legitimate concerns about their own health and that of vulnerable members of their close families.

Today staff report that, at a meeting at Kington Hill yesterday, senior managers paid no heed to concerns raised by staff regarding safety within the workplace. Further, no new safety measures at Kingston Hill were presented, in contrast to St Georges where an up-to-date risk assessment is fully published, staff are offered vaccines and Type II Face Masks are provided for both staff and students. Staff report that senior managers put focus on the ‘student experience’ while paying no attention to the health and welfare of staff.

We appreciate that students may find the current situation unsatisfactory, as do teaching staff and much of the UK population. However, we are all making the best of a difficult situation in trying times. The solution is not to respond by putting our members and colleagues at risk and adding to their stress levels by issuing demands that are inappropriate in a pandemic. In fact, the government are asking people to act as if ‘they had Covid, and that others had Covid’ in order to keep themselves and others safe. The university should be advocating this too by allowing that, where at all possible, teaching should be carried out remotely.

Staff have expressed that they feel their concerns are being dismissed out of hand and that the university is failing in their duty to provide a safe working environment. We note that the only easily accessible risk assessment document available on Staffspace relates to the Townhouse and is dated Sept 2020. This is very clearly unacceptable and a failure of the university’s legal obligation to staff.

Further, senior managers are putting excessive expectations on staff, it is reported leaders in the School of Nursing have expressed an expectation that all staff undertake face-to-face teaching, be a ‘back up teacher’ in case colleagues are off sick or have childcare issues and that all face-to-face teaching lectures be recorded and made available to those students who don’t attend. It was further suggested that face-to-face teaching was no different to going to the supermarket. We find this type of comment highly offensive and reflective of a deplorable attitude towards staff wellbeing which seems to be permeating our senior management layers. It illustrates a clear disregard for the real risks faced by our members, including not only in face-to-face teaching contexts but in commuting to the workplace.  We demand that these comments be publicly retracted along with an apology to staff for the stress they may have caused.

KU UCU branch