After looking
at some data suggesting that in at least one case, overall staffing at a
university was overwhelmingly non-academic two questions arose: 1) What
do they all do? 2) What proportion
would be appropriate? The data here
(which has been partially discussed here)
has some answers.
Page 38 of the Equality
in Higher Education: Statistical Report 2012, Part 1 Staff classifies
non-academic staff into groups. Within the classifications of the data,
non-academics in a university fill these sorts of roles:
Laboratory, engineering, building, IT and
medical technicians (including nurses); Student welfare workers, careers advisors,
vocational training instructors, personnel and planning officers; artistic,
media, public relations, marketing and sports occupations, library assistants,
clerks and general administrative assistants; Secretaries, typists,
receptionists and telephonists; chefs, gardeners, electrical and construction
trades, mechanical fitters and printers; Caretakers, residential wardens, sports
and leisure attendants, nursery nurses and care occupations; Retail and
customer service occupations; Drivers, maintenance supervisors and plant
operatives; Cleaners, catering assistants, security officers, porters and maintenance
workers.
There. That
is what they do, at least in broad categories. Question 1 answered.
Is there
anything to help with the question 2? Yes. Consider page 19 of the report. It
shows that the proportion of academic staff in UK HEIs has grown over the last
ten years. This is a good trend.
Why?
It is good,
because as important as chefs, gardeners, and drivers are, people do not pay to
go to university to eat, look at grass, or drive stuff around. They are
unlikely to go to a university where they can’t eat, where the landscape
looks like a tip (a dump for Americans), and everything stays in the loading dock, so, yes, these roles are important, but
not the purpose of the organisation. Students and their families do not envision
“Operations Support Officers in the
Student Experience Team” when they sign up to ~£30k of debt. What they want are highly qualified experts
in their fields who can teach. So, the trend is encouraging.
The growth
has been slow, from 44.4% to 47.5% over roughly a decade but this is positive
change. Professional and support staff is still the majority and this sector average
seems reasonably healthy.
What about
the variance? You may have heard about the statistician who drowned in a river
with an average depth of 3 feet.
Alas, this
information is missing. Like all statistical studies, those 222 pages make you
realise that one bit of information you want has been left out. The standard
deviation is missing. Individual institution data is absent so you can’t
compute it yourself. However, it is clear that within a sector averaging 47.5%
academic staff, any institution
with 17-34% academic staff is a long way from the norm.
What about the underlying mechanism producing
the change? Is the change because all the cleaners are being let go and
replaced by an external contractor? Are institutions focusing (albeit slowly)
on their teaching and research missions, and hiring more academic staff and
using the others more efficiently? I don’t think anyone knows.
That is the
bad thing about data, it always leaves you hungrier for more. Good thing
brains don’t get fat because I have been eating data like a pig.
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