Mr. Frank Jones:

IFUT welcomes the opportunity to take part in the discussion on this matter that is of the upmost importance to our entire membership. IFUT represent thousands of members, all of whom work in higher education. Our membership includes lecturers, tutors, librarians and researchers. In our submission to the committee we outlined our concerns in relation to the increased reliance on the sector to secure alternative sources of funding, as the public funding is inadequate. We referred to reports from the OECD and others that provided statistical evidence to support our case that Ireland is performing badly with regard to publicly funding the higher education sector when compared to others within the OECD. We must consider why this is the case and make every effort to remedy the situation.

Higher education in Ireland has been underfunded for decades. While Government spending has slowly increased since 2014, the spend per student is still lower than the levels that were in place in 2011. Then, the State spent around €8,500 per year on each student in higher education, while today that figure is below €8,000 per year. Currently, we are ranked 20th in the OECD with regard to our spend per student.

During the period since 2011, the Irish universities slipped significantly in international rankings. In the late 2000s, two of our universities were ranked in the top 100 internationally, with one in the top 50. We now have no institutions in the top 100. The fall in rankings is directly linked to the reduction in spend. Cuts to core funding have resulted in a reduction in staff numbers. The employment control framework of 2010 to 2014 appears to linger across the sector, prohibiting HR departments from recruiting academic staff on the agreed and established contracts. The most obvious way in which the underfunding manifests itself is through the student to staff ratios across our institutions. According to the OECD, Ireland's student to staff ratio is at 23.4:1, far out of line with the OECD average of 15:1. Addressing this ratio must become the number one priority for the Department and for all of us involved across higher education. In an effort to address the need to have student-facing staff, universities have engaged occasional or hourly-paid lecturers. This committee must note that these employees are not, in the eyes of the institutions and universities themselves, lecturers, as lecturing staff are defined as those contracted to undertake a range of academic duties encompassing teaching, research, and contribution and scholarly activity. Given an opportunity, I will expand on this point. Across the universities, different job titles or terms that are used to describe those engaged in this manner include part-time teaching assistants, part-time assistant lecturers, occasional lecturers etc.

Those engaged in this manner are usually on short fixed-term contracts, only paid for their teaching without any of the other benefits associated with being an employee of a university in a position funded by the State. Our members in these grades do not have the opportunity to engage in research work. Being research active is core to the role of a lecturer and the university.

Some employers have failed to afford the terms of the public sector agreements to those engaged in this manner. The precarious nature of their engagement is further compounded by the fact that there is no sectoral engagement on industrial relations, IR, matters across the university sector. The education oversight group has not met since before the Covid-19 pandemic. While these workers are represented by trade unions which are members of the ICTU higher and further education group of unions, the employers will not engage sectorally on IR matters, either through the Irish Universities Association, of which they are all members, or through any other employers' umbrella organisation. Historically, the rationale for the universities’ refusal to engage on IR matters sectorally was, according to the universities, because to do so would interfere with the institutional autonomy they enjoy as a right, a right that we respect. However, UNESCO recommendation 20 from 1997 addresses this point. It states that autonomy should not be used to limit the rights of higher education staff and teaching personnel. The same document, in recommendation 27, provides that:

Higher-education teaching personnel are entitled to the maintaining of academic freedom, that is to say, the right, without constriction by prescribed doctrine, to freedom of teaching and discussion, freedom in carrying out research and disseminating and publishing the results thereof, freedom to express freely their opinion about the institution or system in which they work ...

I ask the committee to consider how a precariously employed part-time assistant lecturer would be expected to exercise this entitlement without any certainty of employment into the future. We in IFUT know the answer.

In IFUT, we believe the failure to fund higher education adequately has given rise to a situation whereby our universities have become over-reliant on precariously employed staff and this has impacted on the quality of our higher education institutions and their global rankings. We need to address the student to staff ratio by engaging these academics, and others, on contracts agreed through local level or sectoral bargaining. Failure to address this matter will have a detrimental effect on the sector and society in general.

I thank members for their attention and welcome the opportunity to discuss these points with them.