Teachers take voluntary redundancies in Federation University changes

The number of voluntary redundancies accepted at Federation University amid an organisational restructure could hurt “student outcomes”.

Federation University’s Ballarat SMB campus.

Federation University has accepted about 20 voluntary redundancies so far as part of an organisational restructure, a local union organiser says.

The university recently announced it was concentrating its six existing academic schools down to three.

Vice-chancellor and president professor Duncan Bentley said the change would attract new students, industry partnerships, and government investment.

“Moving to three larger institutes allows us to bring together different academic disciplines to work more collaboratively with a focus on jobs for our graduates and local employer needs,” he said.

Branch industrial organiser Colin Muir said the National Tertiary Education Union had been concerned about the extent to which private industry would influence curricula.

As an example, he said programming students might learn to use proprietary software owned and used by a single large employer, instead of being taught skills applicable across the industry.

“One of our major concerns was the whole prospect of basing academic qualifications or requirements on industry, industry setting the process for academic qualifications," Mr Muir said.

“They’ve assured us that was never what their intention was … They’ve said that we’ve misread the whole thing and they’ve given us a guarantee that it won’t happen.”

Mr Muir said the university was reviewing forced redundancies involved with its new model, and after a disputed voluntary redundancy process, 20 applications were accepted.

He said others were rejected, and more still were being reviewed.

“Twenty is a fairly significant bite after we’ve already had round after round of redundancies,” Mr Muir said.

“Our view is that the staffing levels, they’ve really cut it to the bone. It really has caused some significant problems with things like workload.

“Student outcomes are absolutely suffering as a result.”

He said another 20 redundancies could be expected by the time negotiations came to an end.

A Federation University spokesman said that because the voluntary redundancy process had not yet concluded, the university did not know how many applications would be accepted in total.