A depressing read in yesterday's Guardian this morning, all about employment in our universities. It seems that roughly half the teaching and research staffs of our universities are on some form of temporary, not to say zero hours, contract. A complaint which appears to have infested both good and bad universities, with Oxford being one of the places at it, while Cambridge was an honourable exception. So universities have become sweat shops where half the staff are eligible for income support, while those at the top of the heap are drawing maybe £350,000 a year.
Depressing in that if the people at the top of this particular, very highly educated heap cannot see their way to behaving better, what hope is there for the rest of the world?
But perhaps it is only right and proper that the wannabee middle class types who work at universities should feel the pinch in the same way as all those working class types in the rust belts up north.
Will the disease spread from the tertiary sector to the secondary sector? One can just hear some hard pressed timetable builder in a big secondary school explaining that it is so much easier to make the timetable work if you can plug all the awkward gaps with staff from the agency down the road. And it certainly helps even more if the agencies have big pools of permanently under-employed teachers to draw from. Incentives in all the right places.
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