Four Years of Failure
We need to be clear on one fact: College staff are expected
to take the hit for senior management failure. Four clear years of failure -
failure of imagination, failure of leadership, failure to simply do their jobs
(unless their remit is to destroy this college). There is a long list of
examples of these failures which will form one basis of our resistance to the
coming attacks; however, the upshot of it all is simple.
Richmond-upon-Thames College needs a radical change of
management direction. In fact,
Richmond-upon-Thames College needs a change of management team.
David Ansell came to a college which had been graded 2 by
Ofsted; a college with a strong reputation for teaching, learning and results;
a college which sent more students into higher education than any other single
institution in the country. Now look at us: graded 3, falling grades, falling
numbers, falling income.
David Ansell came to a college that was, apparently, in some
financial difficulty. He set out to change that, and he did. This is now a
college in severe financial difficulty.
Four years of failure.
Four years, in fact, of outright destructive failure. There
is only one strategy that this senior management team have – to cut, cut, cut.
Not a single strategy to make money or to find and open up new income streams;
or certainly nothing remotely successful.
Instead there have been mass redundancies, increased workloads,
reduced provision, cuts to pay, cuts to holidays, change after change after
change to the management structure – and where have we ended up?
Massive deficit. Crisis.
And what is their response to this crisis?
The same failed strategies, but more so.
Isn’t one definition of madness doing the same thing and
expecting a different result?
In the last dispute UCU members fought the management’s
proposals, and fought them hard; but we also presented proposals and
compromises all along the line – which were rejected out of hand until we went
on strike (at which point the senior management claimed the compromise
proposals were their own).
In the end, though, those compromises just meant that we
still went along the road that has lead us here slightly more slowly. It’s
clear now that it was in entirely the wrong direction.
There is no room for compromise any more. More cuts will
most likely kill the college; this is beyond jobs and conditions, as vitally
important for all of us as they may be.
We need another way. This management are incapable of finding one.
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