The fight back against further cuts to jobs, major changes to our terms and conditions, pensions, workload intensification, degraded student support has begun.

Three years of cuts to staffing and student contact time have ruinously impacted on our work lives and the student experience at Hallam. Despite this, significant further cost-saving is planned this year.

Overview of Cuts & Impacts

• SHU has implemented £40m in budget cuts (2024/25), with £26m more planned (2025/26), including £16m from staffing costs and further cuts as an impact of this expected in 2026/27.
• 1,000 fewer staff than 2 years ago (Mossop, 2025), with more reductions ongoing.
• Student experience is deteriorating: fewer course options, larger class sizes, reduced support, and overworked staff.
• Research is being deprioritised, weakening SHU’s regional, national, and international influence.
• SHU dropped 21 places in national rankings (now 84th in the Complete University Guide).

Critique of the Employer’s Justifications

• SHU blames external pressures (tuition fees, pensions, energy costs, international student limits).
• However, spending has outpaced income and inflation since 2015, indicating poor financial management.
• Major investments:
• £140m campus redevelopment, partly funded by a £70m loan.
• Speculative Brent Cross campus project, now being subcontracted—suggesting it won’t be profitable.
• Executive pay has surged: the number of staff earning over £100k has risen markedly and now places SHU in the top 25% of post-92s in absolute terms.

The current cuts at SHU

Management have confirmed that this includes significant academic restructuring across all three Colleges, involving approximately £8-9m in cuts. These proposals will lead to the loss of a substantial number of jobs through restructures and potential redundancies. This is in addition to consultation on wider staffing reductions across professional services.

These cuts come after years of reductions which have already seen around 1000 jobs lost across the University, alongside a sustained erosion of real terms pay, ongoing attacks on terms and conditions, and significant increases in workload.

Alongside these cuts, management have proposed major changes to the academic workforce. These include:

• splitting the academic workforce between REF returnable staff, research staff and teaching staff
• moving teaching focused staff into a wholly owned subsidiary company
• moving research contracted staff out of the Teachers’ Pension Scheme (TPS) and into the Local Government Pension Scheme (TPS)
• increasing teaching from a maximum of 462 hours to 550 hours per year
• keeping teaching staff with significant responsibility for research (are REF returnable) employed by SHU and on TPS
• increasing maximum weekly teaching to 18 hours
• removing the 38-week teaching year
• removing progression between Grade 7 and Grade 8 and replacing it with a promotion only model which moves away from the national framework agreed for post-92 universities
• increasing teaching responsibilities for research staff

Taken together, these proposals represent:

• job losses and the threat of compulsory redundancies
• major workload intensification
• attacks on terms and conditions, and pensions
• weakening of national framework protections
• weaker national bargaining, leaving us exposed
• a fundamental restructuring of academic roles

To fight these proposals. We have successfully balloted for strike action. 87.7% of members voted for strike action and 93.2% for action short of strike, with a turnout of 72.6%, the highest in the Branch’s recent history.

UCU’s Position and Demands

• Our demands:
• No compulsory redundancies.
• Withdrawal of the proposal to move most academic staff to a wholly owned subsidiary company to create a multi-tier workforce and evade the University’s legal obligation to provide its teaching staff with the Teachers’ Pension Scheme.
• Retention of the progression pathway from lecturer to senior lecturer.
• Withdrawal of proposals to increase the number of hours per week and number of weeks per year that staff are expected to teach.
• We are launching the broader campaign to “Save Sheffield Hallam”
• Cuts are undermining SHU’s ability to function and attract future students.
• We hope everyone in Sheffield will get behind the campaign to save Sheffield Hallam.