Sophie Cotton
It now looks like USYD will have 890 fewer students next year.
What if management didn’t sack anyone? What would that look like for us?
While student numbers have shot up in recent years, staff numbers have not.
The education department’s data only go up to 2022, but we can model what 890 fewer students would mean for workload intensification and teaching hours per student.
The result in the attached graph (dashed line) is absolutely negligible compared to the massive teaching workload intensification over the last 20 years.
Looking at USYD’s teaching workload increases compared to student EFTSL I found that since 2001 “student load has increased by 96%, while equivalent teaching hours are up just 21%. Figure 1 shows that the amount of students has increased from 31 to 50 students per teaching hour in the latest available figures.”
The sector has faced “crisis” after “crisis”, but while Management has cried poor, it is staff who’ve had to take up more and more workload.
All the pauses on new hires, contract non-renewals, casual staff pauses, are management’s attempt to push this number higher and higher in the coming years.
Join the NTEU and help us stop that happening.
We absolutely need to fight the government’s racist student caps, which we are trying to do as a union, but we cannot buy the line that cutting staffing is the answer.
Rank-And-File Action USYD 