“Dealing with 100-250 emails a week, spending over half your time on administration, coping with rising seminar and lecture sizes, but spending less time with students.” UCU 2008
These are the findings of a recent UCU survey of 321 higher education lecturers. The headline figures are:
- more than half of lecturers (53.9%) say they spend most of their working week dealing with administration
- over half of lecturers (53.6%) spend at least 15 hours a week on administration with a quarter (27.4%) devoting more than 25 hours of their working week to the task
- more than a quarter (28.7%) said they deal with over 250 emails a week and those with 250 or more emails a week said they did just 0-5 hours of research a week, 5-15 hours of teaching, but 25 hours or more of administration
- over two thirds (71%) reported increases in class sizes at their institution in the last 10 years, but only a quarter (23.4%) said they now spend more time with students than they did a decade ago
- of the 71% who reported growing class sizes, nearly half (44%) said they were spending less time with students.
More information on these figures is available in this UCU news briefing.