Earlier this year, University and College Union (UCU) members at London South Bank University (LSBU) announced strike action after accusing the institution of seeking to create a “two-tier workforce”.

The trigger? LSBU had set out proposals to move many of its existing academics into new “teaching and scholarship” roles, with a focus on “outstanding teaching-related activity, student success, and subject leadership”. This would mean that many staff currently holding research roles would have to apply for newly created teaching positions, and the unsuccessful applicants would have to leave the university altogether.

The change will alter the university’s ratio of research to teaching staff, drastically reducing the former to just one-third of its workforce. Staff oppose the plans, and have undertaken strike action and a marking and assessment boycott in protest. Politicians have spoken out, warning that the changes could harm “the quality and continuity of the educational experience offered to students”.

But LSBU is far from alone in its desire to drive research academics into teaching-only roles. Similar plans have been explored by the University of Brighton and Sheffield Hallam University, among others.

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Critics say that forcing staff on to teaching-only contracts breaks the traditional teaching-research model that distinguishes higher education from other forms of learning. They argue that it limits career opportunities for research-focused staff and has potential ramifications for the wider research ecosystem.

One UCU representative at LSBU, who did not want to be named, said this shift represented a “deskilling” and a “devaluing” of the higher education sector, and would ultimately damage the quality of education that students receive.

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“For teaching, it means there is not that organic mix of developing knowledge and the transfer of knowledge, which is bad both from the lecturer’s side and the student’s side,” they said.

The changes are not evenly spread across disciplines. In social sciences, humanities and arts for people and economy (SHAPE) subjects, the number of teaching-only roles has increased dramatically over the past decade, a by the British Academy found. Across those subjects, teaching-only numbers rose by 49��per cent between 2012-13 and 2024-25, from 31,500 (34��per cent of all SHAPE staff) to 46,890 (42��per cent of such staff).

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Paul Bersebach/Orange County Register via Getty Images (edited)

Teaching-and-research staff numbers did grow slightly in this period, from 52,655 to 53,910, but as a proportion of total SHAPE staff, their share shrank from 57��per cent to 48��per��cent.

What is driving this? Teaching and pedagogy received a big boost from the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), which was established in 2017. It was hailed as a gamechanger��by many who thought that UK higher education had become too focused on research amid the dominance of the Research Excellence Framework, which informs the allocation of some £2 billion in funding each year; they believed it would elevate the status of teaching.

And while TEF has raised the profile of teaching and pedagogy within the sector, academics have doubts whether this move away from research has been spurred by a newfound appreciation of teaching’s value.

Steve Jones, a professor of higher education at the University of Manchester, said: “Sadly, the turn to teaching-based contracts definitely isn’t being driven by an interest in pedagogy. It’s being driven by wider economic factors.”

Staff on teaching-based contracts are not paid to do research, he noted. “So employers can have them doing more student-facing work – not just teaching, but supervision, marking and so on. It’s primarily a cost-saving measure.”

Even the self-described “research-intensive” Russell Group universities, far from being immune to this trend, have, somewhat surprisingly, been at its forefront. The British Academy found that all SHAPE subject areas in the Russell Group recorded growth in teaching-only staff, with many increasing numbers by more than 200��per cent. The biggest increases were in the social sciences: psychology (403��per cent), archaeology (319��per cent), sociology (288��per cent), social policy (285��per cent) and business and management (269��per��cent).

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Jones said the removal of student number caps in 2015 – which he called a “disastrous” move – allowed universities to rapidly expand student enrolments, particularly the Russell Group institutions. Bigger student intakes coupled with university job cuts have resulted in “bigger classes, so there’s a need for more teaching”.

“Universities don’t want to have their best researchers spending all of their time on first-year undergraduate groups of 200 students, with all the marking that comes with it,” Jones explained. “So, they’re willing to give up the close relationship between teaching and research because that’s what the market demands, and that’s what their business model demands.”

Paul Ashwin, a professor of higher education at Lancaster University, agreed that the shift was born of economic expediency. Universities’ largest source of income is tuition fees, “so if you have a member of staff on a teaching-only contract, they can teach more hours than a member of staff who’s on a research-and-teaching contract”.

“Teaching-only contracts and teaching quality are not necessarily connected”, he added, noting that historically many institutions “would base some of the quality of their teaching on having research-active staff”.

However, Ashwin stressed, the move is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, the number of students has risen in recent years, and this requires staff.

Often, such positions are presented as “teaching and scholarship” roles rather than teaching-only, he said. Definitions of such roles can vary between universities, with some allowing more engagement with non-teaching opportunities than others. Ashwin believes these nuances can be an important distinction.

“For me, that’s the crucial thing: is there space for the person who’s teaching to maintain a living relationship with their subject? That could be through research; it could be through the scholarship of teaching and learning; it could be through continuing to engage in industry in the area that they’re teaching. Research isn’t the only space by which you can support high-quality teaching, but you do have to give academics the access to maintain a living relationship with their subject.”

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Getty Images montage

Amid this shift is a paradox. While the long-term trend has been a recalibration towards teaching, in the shorter term, teaching-only staff have been the hardest hit by the sector’s sweeping job cuts. Experts say this seeming contradiction is reflective of the contract types more typical for teaching-only staff and of the post-pandemic academic landscape.

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In 2024-25, the number of teaching-only staff at UK institutions totalled 85,170, which was 4��per cent down on the year before. By contrast, the number of research-only roles rose by 4��per cent to 52,220, according to data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency.

Joanna Thornborough, senior policy adviser at the British Academy and co-author of the SHAPE report, noted that the statistics show a rise in teaching-only staff during the pandemic, “when there was a real emphasis on teaching” as universities switched online and needed “the staff resource to be able to cope with that”. She speculated that declines in such staff numbers may be, in part, an adjustment reflecting universities’ return to more traditional teaching patterns.

But Ashwin believes that cuts to teaching-only staff are more closely tied to such individuals’ contract terms, which make them easier to dismiss because the positions are precarious, than they are to the roles’ teaching focus. Historically, universities might look to hire teaching-only staff on temporary or zero-hour contracts if a research academic won a grant and their teaching needed to be covered. “They are the staff who are most vulnerable because when institutions face financial hardship, they look at things they can cut easily. If you’re someone on a zero-hours or sessional contract, that’s easier for the university to cut,” he said. “It’s more related to the kind of contract you have with the institution, than whether you’re doing teaching or teaching and research.”

Jones agreed, but felt that the nature of teaching-only roles did also make those staff more vulnerable. Research-focused staff may be on longer contracts to prevent them from leaving for a different institution if they win big grants. This means they cannot be dismissed as easily as colleagues on teaching contracts.

“If a programme closes, your teaching-only staff have got nothing else to do unless there’s an alternative programme”, he said.

Geoff Goss, chair of the LSBU University and College Union branch, said that this is leading to a “bifurcation” of teaching and research. An added complication at LSBU is that, as part of its restructure, staff who transfer to the teaching contracts will be employed by a subsidiary firm, separate from the research staff, meaning that “you can’t just cross over – you have to apply for a job”.

Goss, who is remaining on a research contract, worries that this will create restrictive silos around staff and hinder collaboration. “I��do a��lot of interdisciplinary research, but now there’s loads of staff I��can’t talk to any more because their contracts won’t allow it,” he said.

A rift is evident not just between staff types but career stages, too. The rise in teaching-only staff was most acute among early and mid-career academics, the British Academy research found. Teaching-only contracts as a proportion of early-level roles rose by 7��percentage points, from 59��per cent to 66��per cent between 2012-13��and 2024-25. For mid-career roles, there was a 12��percentage point rise in teaching-only contracts, from 15��per cent to 27 per cent.

At professorial level, teaching and research contracts leapt by 36��per cent over the same period.

Thornborough expressed serious concern about what this means for the future of the sector. If early career academics have fewer research opportunities, “that limits their ability to grow their research profile” and blocks skills development and career progression.

“I think this does place a limiting factor on the future of research in the UK. Not just in terms of the actual personnel involved…But I��think this is potentially going to impact our ability to meet and address wider societal and global challenges as well. And there’s implications here for interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary working, too.”

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Evil Genius/Alamy (edited)

“Ideally” research and teaching work “jointly together in a mutually supportive and reinforcing relationship”, she said. This link between research and teaching “is really one of the things that separates what happens in universities from other forms of education or the wider research sector outside of academia”.

The significance of a move away from this joined-up approach should not be underestimated, critics warn. The risk is that “teaching is seen as income generation and research becomes something you do for prestige”, Jones said. “Every year, teaching and research slip a little bit further away from each other. In the long run, is that really the direction of travel we want? Is that the path that other sectors are taking in other nations? I’m not sure it is.”

The shrinking proportion of early career researchers is particularly worrying for the future of university research, he said. “What is going to happen in 10��years’ time?” he asked, if universities do not have a pipeline of talented researchers building careers. Instead, institutions will be increasingly reliant on older research staff, who “tend to not retire early any more because there’s a cost-of-living crisis and the pension isn’t as good as it used to be”.

There could also be implications for the flagship devolution policy of Andy Burnham, the UK’s prime minister, Thornborough argued. The breaking of the “research-teaching nexus” could impact regional growth capacity, she said, as this changing model of higher education is affecting institutions and regions “unevenly”.

“If there’s increasingly few academic job opportunities or fewer opportunities for early career researchers in a breadth of disciplines, in certain areas, there’s a question as to what that means for these aspirations towards devolution and UK-wide growth”, she said.

But for the staff who are being forced to give up their research, this is a personal loss as much as a societal one, which challenges their core identity as academics, according to Goss.

“People don’t go into academia for the money. It’s not what drives them. Most of them go into it because they love their subject. They want to develop their ideas. They want to do research. And they’re losing that,” he said. “We’re seeing people really struggling.”

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juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com