Aberystwyth University trade unions have entered a period of ‘collective consultation’ and negotiation with the employer.

As part of the process unions will have access to responses to the consultation submitted by individual staff. This will be with personal information (e.g. names, or a comment based on someone’s personal circumstance, like a health issue) redacted. Union representatives only have access on the basis of maintaining confidentiality.

This will help unions to better understand the issues raised by staff, and ideas they may have proposed to address problems resulting from the proposals to restructure.

This post is also to notify members of UCU that as representatives of staff in the collective consultation individuals are welcome to send us direct a copy of their responses to or thoughts on a specific consultation. Please email ucustaff@aber.ac.uk if you wish to do this.

The more information we have the better placed we are to engage meaningfully in this collective consultation, to understand staff concerns and to negotiate on behalf of staff with the employer.

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Thousands of staff at campuses across the country are either in dispute and taking industrial action already or balloting to do so as a result of major cuts announced to staffing across the higher education sector over the last three or four months.

The Welsh and Scottish governments have announced modest support measures in recent weeks, but fundamentally the model for funding the training needs and research of the UK is broken. Government needs to act to Stop the Cuts.

Members can sign the UCU petition and find out more about the Stop the Cuts campaign here .

“This account doesn’t exist“. That’s what you will find if you go to our Twitter page.

It’s a pain, but we could not in good conscience continue to provide revenue support for the owners and abusers of the social media platform.

We are merrily locatable on BlueSky – @ucuaber.bsky.social – which is smaller but actually seems to have greater reach amongst the academic community, just without the extreme levels of racist, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic and generally shouty rhetoric that has come to characterise Twitter in its billionaire playground phase.