Today, Monday 28 February 2022, is the deadline for the Skills Match Questionnaire (SMQ) submission which will determine the outcome of the redundancy selection for the Academic Portfolio Review (APR) and the Professional Service Blueprint (PSB), which are both part of the ‘Recovery Programme’. This concludes Stage 2 of the consultation process and concludes the individual consultation period. On two occasions (9 Feb, 21 Feb), during the individual consultation process, Goldsmiths UCU raised concerns about the consistency of treatment of affected staff members in these consultations meetings and the information provided in these meetings. We raised these concerns in view of the impact this would have on the fairness of the SMQ scoring and any redundancy selections that would be made based on this scoring. On both occasions, we requested that the SMQ deadline be delayed so that consistent information, resources, and time could be provided to all affected staff, to enable fairness in the selection process. This was refused on both occasions by Susan Edwards.
Below is a written record of experiences observed by our casework team and affected staff during Stage 2. Everything that appears in this record can be verified by minutes taken by GUCU caseworkers at individual consultation meetings. We contend that this evidence compromises the legitimacy of the SMQ scoring process and that any dismissals that result from this scoring will be unfair. We trust that those scoring the SMQs will be made aware of the points below and will be fully informed of the implications of going ahead with the scoring and redundancy selection, when evidence of unfair treatment in the process has been formally raised by GUCU in advance. We will be sharing this information with all of our members.
I/ WHO IS IN AND OUT OF SCOPE –
In individual consultation meetings, affected academic staff in departmental areas variously described in Recovery documentation as ‘priority areas’, have been given conflicting information about the significance of these priorities in the selection process. While it has been strongly suggested that the college will retain certain areas of provision within departments in both the original consultation documents and the consultation outcome report, and members of senior management have made such claims publicly (Francis Corner email 19 October 2021), in individual consultation meetings members have been told that the priority areas will play no role in the criteria used to score affected staff in the SMQs. Publicly and formally declaring these priority areas in advance of the scoring process without at the same time publicly and formally informing all staff that these priorities will play no role in the criteria used to score affected staff in the SMQs has caused immense confusion ahead of the SMQ deadline. While the APR Outcome Report states on p.18:
Information shared with the SMQ will include an outline of future curricular priorities – these will relate to those priorities set out within the College’s Curriculum Framework (cf CCR(Comprehensive Curriculum Review)) – including the elaboration of Goldsmiths’ eight principles for curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. The priorities will also include evidence-driven prioritisation of particular subject areas for programme focus (including gaps and new opportunities work within the CCR), thus ensuring that each department’s curriculum requirements as set out within the APR process enable the department to provide strong offers for the future with the same requirements as for all other departments within our BAU activities.
Not only does this explicitly identify the importance of future curricular priorities of departments for the SMQ, alongside the CCR Strategic Principles, which contradicts what affected staff were told in individual consultation meetings, but this information was in fact not shared with the SMQ on the SharePoint. Further confusion has been caused by the fact that Elisabeth Hill stated at the SMQ workshop for academic staff (9/2/22) that ‘the [scoring] panel will be considering how each submission outlines the staff member’s contribution to the focus and approach that the College has set out for the future. This will include factors such as teaching and research focus, approach to pedagogy and assessment and contribution in priority areas both within and outside of the College.’ This was supplemented with a PowerPoint presentation that explicitly identified these departmental priority areas. This directly contradicts what some affected members of staff have been told in individual consultation meetings according to our casework record. Additionally, a member of the Recovery Team has told at least one member of staff during an individual consultation that the scoring of the SMQs does not directly relate to redundancies, but that it is when the moderation happens after the scoring that additional factors will be used to judge between people based on these priority areas. Again, this contradicts what some affected members of staff have been told in individual consultation meetings according to our casework record.
Meanwhile, in one consultation meeting, a member of the Recovery Team confirmed that if a member of staff currently teaching within a priority area were to be dismissed, it would not be legally feasible for the university to continue to offer their subject in the department, as the work performed by that member of staff would not have diminished, and therefore it would not have been necessary for them to be in scope for redundancy in the first place. In yet another consultation exchange, a member in a priority area was told that the priority commitments “should be understood as a clear intention to support this subject area, regardless of the outcome of consultation” and that “if one of the outcomes is that the current expertise in that subject area is no longer in the College, we will still pursue this commitment in any way we can”. This appears to be an admission that the Recovery Team is aware that work carried out in certain areas will not diminish, yet staff members currently performing this work remain in scope for redundancy. If the Recovery Team is aware that areas of work in departments will not diminish because there is a priority to retain certain subjects, it is not clear what the legal justification is for having staff in these areas at risk of redundancy.
Given that the Recovery Team has given conflicting information about the status of these priority areas in terms of how they will influence the scoring of the SMQs and how they relate to the redundancy pooling, we are aware that some affected staff will be completing SMQs with incorrect information. Since the casework team does not know which of these versions is accurate, because the Recovery Team has not centrally addressed this issue during the individual consultation process, we have been unable to advise members appropriately. Some staff members will be disadvantaged in the scoring process because information provided by the Recovery Team about the scoring criteria has been contradictory. As a result, any redundancy selections based on the SMQ scoring will be unfair because the scoring criteria was not made clear to all affected staff.
II/ Role of Comprehensive Curriculum Review (CCR) in the SMQ Scoring
The SMQ guidance document states that questionnaire answers should allow the scoring panel to assess how the experiences and achievements of staff members will contribute to the future needs of the department and the College, defined in relation to the “Curriculum Framework Principles”. Given the confusion surrounding the status of the priority areas publicly and formally declared by the college in relation to the scoring process, these references to department requirements in the future and the CCR adds further confusion. Affected Staff have been told throughout the consultation process that the Recovery SharePoint is the area of the college systems where all relevant information about the redundancy process should be located. To date, there is no document labelled “Curriculum Framework Principles” in the SharePoint. Staff have questioned the status of this document in individual consultations and have been provided conflicting information. Some HR consultants at individual consultation meetings have told staff that they do not know the status of this document or where it would be found. Some staff members have been provided substantial documentation about the CCR from Heads of Departments including the CCR Best Practice document. This document, which gives a clearer indication of how the principles might be put into practice in section 6, was not provided to all members of staff completing a SMQ.
In one individual consultation meeting, a member of the Recovery Team told a member asking about the relevance of the CCR to the SMQ scoring that there was no document which explicitly detailed these priorities in any of the recovery related documentation and that it might be a good idea to synthesise these priorities from the CCR to put onto the Recovery SharePoint. Therefore, some affected staff have not been informed about the existence of this document, while some members of staff have been provided a great deal of documentation about the CCR from HoDs when they have individually queried the issue. Clearly, there is a massive issue of fairness if some members of staff have a lot of information, and some have no information about the criteria being used to determine scores of the SMQs.
GUCU raised this issue with the Recovery Team on 9 February and were told on 17 February that “The CCR Strategic Principles were published on Goldmine in May 2021” and that it has been “available to all staff of the College and has been for some time.” Note that the SMQ guidance refers to ‘Curriculum Framework Principles’ not the ‘CCR Strategic Principles’. Given the importance that the Recovery Team are now putting on the CCR framework it seems negligent that all staff were not centrally contacted with clear links to all relevant documents, rather than relying on an ad hoc approach which involves staff having to uncover a documented located outside of the SharePoint and piece things together through Staff News, or alternatively undertake their own search on Goldmine, as CCR is not listed in any of the drop down headings in Goldmine. I searched emails to see how staff were informed of the CCR and how to access relevant documents. The first time the CCR was mentioned in any detail was in the 4/2/22 Staff News, where there was a link to the Connected Curriculum and another link to the CCR page which was updated in January 2022 and now included a link to the Strategic Principles document and the CCR evidence pack. It is therefore not the case that staff have been directly made aware of the existence of this document and it is not the case that the Recovery Team have made any effort to centrally inform staff that these documents would be used in the scoring of the SMQ. There is no mention of the CCR Strategic Principles in the Questions & Answers document taken from the SMQ Workshop held by Elisabeth Hill on 4 and 9 February 2022. Given all this, it is unreasonable to assume that affected staff would be aware that the CCR would form such an integral part of the Recovery Programme selection process for redundancy and the related SMQs. And with the conflicting information provided at different individual consultation meetings about the status of the CCR, this again undermines the fairness of the scoring process.
This does not begin to touch on the problem of having principles taken from an incomplete Curriculum Review being used as criteria for the scoring process. In a Staff News email sent on 12/5/21, the college clearly communicated to staff that “the work of the CCR will be taking place long after the Recovery Programme is complete.” So, it has long been known that the CCR would not be in a finished state until long after the intended completion of the Recovery Programme. It is not clear how a Curriculum Review that is not finished can serve as fair and transparent criteria for redundancy selection. And, indeed, one Recovery Team member admitted in an individual consultation meeting that it was highly unorthodox for the CCR not to have taken place before it was used as the basis for selection criteria. Criteria used for a redundancy process must be fair and objective, and therefore transparent. Since the criteria being used for the redundancy selection in this case are in an unfinished state, they are neither fair, objective, nor transparent.
III/ DISCREPANCIES BETWEEN PEOPLE IN CONSULTATION PANEL
Individual consultation panels have been made up of HR representatives with vastly differing levels of knowledge about the Recovery Programme. The Recovery Team has been unable to guarantee that a representative of the college, equipped to answer questions from affected staff, would be in attendance at all individual consultation meetings. In some cases, a member of the Recovery Team would chair the individual consultation panel and would be able to answer most questions raised by affected staff, in other cases an HR Consultant with no experience of the Recovery Programme would chair the individual consultation panel and would be unable to answer most questions raised by affected staff. Some affected staff were told by HR Consultants in individual consultation meetings that questions could not be answered because no-one from the Recovery Team was available to answer them. In one case, a member gained answers to only 4 out of 21 questions asked. This has meant that many affected staff have had a qualitatively diminished opportunity for genuine and meaningful consultation than others. HR consultants were unable to answer questions about priority areas and the ‘CCR Framework Principles’ in relation to the SMQ scoring or questions about equalities, while members of the Recovery Team were able to answer such questions, even if inconsistently. GUCU raised this inconsistency of treatment with the Recovery Team on 9 February and were told:
The College committed to ensuring there would be individuals present with knowledge to deal with questions and where questions are not able to be responded to on the day individuals have the following options:
- They can request a follow up meeting if it can be accommodated; and/or
- They can receive follow up via email, or send clarification emails after a meeting to enable an email response to be received.
This has meant that some affected staff have been reliant on the Recovery Team answering questions in writing outside of the individual consultation meetings, rendering the individual consultation meetings far from meaningful. And where staff have been forced to seek consultation in this limited way, they have received answers only a matter of days (in some instances, one working day) before the SMQ deadline. When answers have been provided in this way, they are incredibly short and in some cases inconclusive. In other cases, some members did not receive answers to questions. All of this clearly demonstrates that the meaningfulness of the consultation provided to affected staff has been inconsistent. That some affected staff have had to wait for emails coming only a day/days before the SMQ deadline, before being able to complete the SMQ, means that there has been a severe lack of parity in how affected staff have been prepared for the selection process.
IV/ PREVENTION OF TRADE UNION REPRESENTATION
The Recovery Team scheduled at least 28 individual meetings (totalling roughly 40 hours) over the space of three working days (24 – 26 Feb). The GUCU casework team simply do not have the necessary resources to meet this demand. We have one Casework Coordinator paid 0.2 in facilities time (one day a week) and outside of this, all other casework representatives are volunteering their time alongside their teaching work. GUCU informed the Recovery Team of this situation on 17 February and requested a suspension of the SMQ deadline so that all members could access Trade Union representation at their individual consultation meeting. GUCU was told by the Recovery Team that if the branch is unable to meet this demand, then members can be accompanied by a colleague. GUCU caseworkers have specialist training to be able to support affected staff in individual consultation meetings with understanding employment rights, college policy and Recovery Programme related documentation. We contend that the employer has created conditions that prevent our members from gaining TU representation and view this as an indirect refusal to allow some affected staff from accessing TU representation. All staff have the right to be accompanied to redundancy consultation meetings with their TU representatives.
The Recovery Team argued that the reason so many individual consultation meetings were scheduled across 3 working days was “in part…because of earlier advice by GUCU to its members in relation to rescheduling meetings and has now led to meetings taking place over a more condensed period of time.” GUCU advised members that if they did not have the necessary information required to attend consultation meetings that would allow them to meaningfully engage with the process, they should request this information from the Recovery Team before attending any meetings. Since the Recovery Team failed to provide all this necessary information until mid-way through stage 2 (and even then, there remained the outstanding discrepancies around the CCR documentation and priority areas), it was the Recovery Team’s responsibility to give due regard to the availability of staff and representatives for consultation (as stated in the Policy on Managing Organisational Change). This was not done, and instead, at least 28 individual consultations were rushed through over the space of 3 days. This has meant that many affected staff have been given virtually no time to digest information from individual consultations before completing SMQs and no time to send follow up questions to the Recovery Team. Some affected staff received minutes from consultation meetings and answers to follow up questions one day before the SMQ deadline. All of this again points to a severe lack of parity in the treatment of affected staff during the individual consultation meetings which ultimately means that some staff will be disadvantaged when completing the SMQ.
V/ OTHER OUTSTANDING ISSUES
- On p.17 of the APR Outcome Report, it is stated that to address concerns of those asking for the marking scheme used to score SMQs, “guidance will be elaborated and clear information about mark allocation will be shared with both staff completing the SMQ and with panel members”. This was not provided to staff completing the SMQ.
Based on this record we have to conclude that the Recovery Team has failed to offer genuine and meaningful consultation to all staff affected by the Recovery Programme, failed to provide consistent and relevant information to all affected staff ahead of the SMQ deadline and ultimately failed to maintain fairness in the redundancy selection process. We are now following up all of these issues with UCU’s legal team and we will be supporting all further individual grievances submitted to the college connected to stage 2 consultations. We trust that all individual grievances connected to stage 2 consultations will be handled in line with the College Grievance Policy and any conflict of interests relating to line manager or Recovery Team involvement in grievance handling will be avoided.