About the charge that @ucu is politicising the major obstacles that we face in the new academic year: pointing out that the endeavours of senior management to provide this thing they call “a campus experience” will inevitably fail is simply to face up to reality. There will be

cases of COVID-19 and we will be obliged to follow government guidance. This makes it clear that people who have been in close contact with someone who has tested positive has to self isolate for 14 days since they were last in close contact with that person. So we know - and

have to expect that any face to face teaching is going to be subject potentially to multiple stops and starts. This isn’t good for anyone and requires a huge amount of additional work to manage effectively. We can’t stop pointing this out because people don’t want it to be true

We all wish it wasn’t the case. And our position as a union is very straightforward. 1. We need appropriate safety measures in place to minimise the risk of any member of staff or student becoming seriously ill with COVID-19, experience long term impairment

-related to COVID-19 or in the very worse case scenario to die. And 2. we want students to have as good a learning experience as is possible during a global pandemic. The latter means no-one can or should pretend that this academic year is going to look like other academic years.

We are still learning about COVID-19 - better understanding will help us develop better ways of managing it & reducing risks - but we are not there yet. And we don’t have a functioning test/track or trace system in this country yet so we can’t as a union respond to the pandemic

on the basis of something that doesn’t yet exist. We just need our employers & the govt to acknowledge the realities we face. 1. The coming together of students will cause a spike of COVID-19 cases 2. To mitigate this, subjects that can be taught online should be taught that way

to minimise the numbers of people on campus, making it safer for disciplines that have to be taught on
campus. No redundancies for teaching staff (and better still further recruitment) would enable us to have smaller classes sizes & mean that people don’t have to teach across

bubbles of students making it safer & more manageable. @ucu’s position is just a straightforward response to what we all accept is an incredibly difficult situation exacerbated by the non arrival of a “world class” test/track/trace system, the chaotic handling of A level results

& BTECs this year & their impact on recruitment, not to mention the broader problems produced by the marketisation of higher education& entirely justifiable anger about tuition fees & the debt faced by this cohort of students who have already been badly letdown. @ucu