Call for collaboration between tertiary orgs

Association of University Staff

Media Release
Attn Education Reporter 30 January 2007

International report calls for collaboration between tertiary-education organisations

The Association of University Staff (AUS) has welcomed an international report raising concerns about academic workloads in universities and suggesting that there be greater collaboration between institutions to foster mobility for academic staff.

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Thematic Review of Tertiary Education in New Zealand, which was released today, recognises the importance of tertiary-education staff in ensuring the quality of New Zealand institutions, and identifies a number of issues that need to be tackled in order to maintain this quality.

The report sets out five main areas where work demands are perceived to be expanding. They are compliance requirements and information requests, administrative duties associated with the introduction of new systems and changes to university policies, increasing numbers of programme and paper offerings, increased workloads resulting from the variety of delivery modes supported by the university and increasing demand for a longer teaching year.

AUS National President, Professor Nigel Haworth said that a number of conclusions reached in the report would form the basis of on-going discussions between the union and university management, government and education officials. “While this report contains many positive comments about the tertiary-education sector, it identifies a number of pressure points which must be addressed,” he said. “Many of these relate to staff and workloads, and we support the view of the OECD that the solution lies in resolving issues through collaboration across the sector and not trying to resolve them at the level of individual institutions.”

ENDS