News

Our Branch Equality Officer, Denzil de Souza wrote a comprehensive report on the UCU Equality conference, we have produced a summary in this article and the full report is on our blog: https://oubucu.wordpress.com.

The Conference took place at Aston Conference Centre, Birmingham in December 2016 and was divided into four separate sub-conferences, one for each equality group: disabled members, female members, black members and LGBT members.

We asked our members for comments about what it’s like to be on a fixed-term or associate lecturer contract. We received eloquent testimony about the impact on individuals and on the work staff are able to do. Here is a selection of the replies we received and thank you to all the members who sent us their comments.

“I would be so happy if we were given permanent contracts so that we can concentrate on our work and continue to put our students first.”

We won a better deal for members who were affected by the locations closures, including a rational London weighting, better support for home-working, agreement to maintain some level of regional infrastructure, and a co-operative approach to the move to shift-work.

We conducted a survey into the Group Tuition Policy and one of our Vice Presidents, Caitlin Adams, has written a report on the survey results. Thank you to everyone who responded to our survey.

The OU branch of UCU sent a letter to the Chair of the OU Council, Richard Gillingwater in November 2016 over the problems with the Group Tuition Policy - view letter.

Sally Hunt was the speaker at an OU branch of UCU Open meeting on 15th March 2017 in the OU Library.  She was recently re-elected as the General Secretary of the University and College Union (UCU), view press release.

You can view a recording of the meeting on the OU Stadium website.

We have created a blog website to be used in conjunction with our branch newsletter, the Spark - from time to time we add helpful and useful documents to the blog website.

The most recent items on the blog are comments from our Associate Lecturer (AL) members on what it's like to be an Open University AL.

June 2017 - We have launched a new branch website, with thanks to Caroline in the OU Communications unit. Our Branch Administrator has been using a Lotus Notes content management system since 2009, however the branch felt that it was time to get the branch website updated so we are now using an Open University Drupal template website. We really like it and hope you to too, please send your comments to ucu@open.ac.uk.