Current Practice in the Allocation of Academic Workloads

Significant factors within UK higher education include explicit competition, regulatory demands and pressures to maintain student numbers despite tuition fee increases. Universities have responded by more actively managing finances and quality but seemingly not staff time. This paper sets out findings on the processes and practices surrounding academic workload allocation (WLA) in universities, based on 59 detailed interviews from a cross section of staff. The main findings from this research are that there are a huge variety of different practices surrounding WLA and much potential for improvement. The approaches observed can be seen to work in a continuum from informal to partial, to the more comprehensive. Although many felt the disciplinary context to be very important to the process chosen, the findings of the research reveal that this is not the case.