The University of Derby UCU has written a letter to University management about the workload implications of the University’s current transformation plan. The text of the letter follows.

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We are writing to raise urgent concerns about the pressures of the Transformation plan, and the move to block delivery in particular. These are creating an unacceptable level of workplace stress, and they engage the University’s legal duties.

Under section 2 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 the University must ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health, safety and welfare at work of its employees. Work-related stress falls within that duty. The Health and Safety Executive’s guidance is unambiguous: ‘Employers have a legal duty to protect workers from stress at work by doing a risk assessment and acting on it.’ Under regulation 3 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 that assessment must be suitable and sufficient, and it must be reviewed where there has been a significant change in the matters to which it relates. Under regulation 4A of the Safety Representatives and Safety Committees Regulations 1977 the University must consult union safety representatives in good time on the introduction of any measure which may substantially affect the health and safety of the staff they represent. The Transformation plan, and block delivery in particular, are measures which may substantially affect staff health and safety. The HSE’s Management Standards identify six areas of work design that affect stress at work: demands, control, support, relationships, role and change. Block delivery bears directly on demands, control, support, role and change.

The stress is already present. Between June and July 2026 the branch surveyed staff on transformation and workload. Of the 38 who responded, 35 said they are worried about their future workload; 21 said their workload is always difficult to manage and a further 14 that it sometimes is; 29 said they often work extra hours in the evenings and at weekends. Two respondents said the workload is making them ill, one of them off sick with work-related stress at the time of responding, and others described colleagues off sick or leaving. Their words are in the appendix. This is evidence of a risk to health which the University is obliged to assess and to act upon.

The immediate case is postgraduate taught provision. The short time between the sharing of the transformation plans and requirements and the request for PGT programmes to be redesigned to fit them is causing additional work and stress. Programme leaders have been given very short deadlines to respond to the new structures, and any meaningful conversation with their teams makes those deadlines shorter still.

This comes as the same staff are setting up for the new academic year and preparing to teach modules, many newly validated and so requiring additional preparation.

As people apply the new structures to their own courses, questions arise about delivery, content and course structure, about how the new courses will be staffed, and about whether fewer, larger modules lead inevitably to cuts to staff teams. These are big questions which require more than a few weeks to explore and plan for. High-pressure deadlines and the prospect of job losses or realignment sit squarely within the HSE’s areas of demands and change.

The Academic Framework approved by Academic Board on 1 July 2026 fixes the parameters that will generate that workload from September 2027: eight to sixteen hours of scheduled contact a week for every 30-credit module, taught in seven-week blocks (4.15.4); a Digital Companion of weekly asynchronous activities, recordings and engagement monitoring for every on-campus module (4.15.1–4.15.3); formative assessment in every module (4.14.9); industry co-delivery, live briefs and networking events at Level 7 (4.8.1); and, to reach that point, the re-approval of every existing programme (1.4). It contains no modelling of staff workload. It sets no marking window between blocks, so marking for one block will fall inside the teaching of the next, and will fall heaviest on staff who teach in consecutive blocks; and it says nothing about how extensions and resits are to be taught and marked once the block has moved on. The Framework is also silent on how unevenly the intensity falls: staff with caring responsibilities or disabilities, and those on fractional contracts, absorb a seven-week block differently from their full-time colleagues, and the synthesis lists ‘the distribution of staff workload and emotional labour’ among the equity considerations in its recommendations.

The risk is foreseeable, and the University has foreseen it. Its own rapid evidence synthesis, Block delivery models in higher education: a rapid evidence synthesis to inform practice at the University of Derby (January 2026), finds that ‘workload intensity is the dominant staff challenge across the evidence’ and lists under ‘What causes problems’: ‘Students and staff often report high workload and stress, especially around assessment’ and ‘Staff marking and feedback demands are frequently compressed and exhausting’. Of block delivery it says: ‘Rolled out quickly or treated as a simple compression exercise, it risks increasing stress without improving education.’ It recommends that institutions ‘[a]llocate sufficient preparation time for block redesign’ and ‘[m]onitor workload distribution and avoid staff being scheduled across multiple concurrent blocks where possible’, and states: ‘The evidence supports cautious, iterative adoption rather than wholesale, uniform implementation.’ Its design guidance puts it plainly: ‘The evidence is clear: Pedagogical gains disappear when staff are exhausted.’ The Framework approved six months later provides for none of these measures, and the PGT deadlines now in force are the rapid roll-out the synthesis warns against.

We wish to raise this as a general concern and ask the University to answer the following questions in writing:

• What risk assessment of work-related stress, or review of an existing assessment, has the University carried out in relation to the Transformation plan and to block delivery, when was it made, and will it be shared with UCU safety representatives?
• When were UCU safety representatives consulted on the introduction of block delivery, as regulation 4A of the 1977 Regulations requires?
• What assessment of the equality impacts of the Transformation plan and of block delivery has been made in discharge of the public sector equality duty under section 149 of the Equality Act 2010, what mitigation has been considered, and will the University share its Equality Impact Assessment or equivalent analysis?
• What support is being offered to those responsible for submitting new plans for PGT?
• How is time being freed for them to respond fully, given that the deadlines fall at the start of the academic year?
• How is staff time being freed so that those who will deliver the redesigned courses can take part in redesigning them?
• If a reduction in modules implies cuts to staff teams, what is the University’s plan, and when will it consult the unions on it?
• How is this additional work being reflected in AWPs this year, and how will AWPs from 2027–28 account for marking under block delivery, including for staff teaching in consecutive blocks and for extensions and resits, for which the Academic Framework makes no provision?
• Which of the workload recommendations in the University’s own evidence synthesis have been adopted, where do they appear in the Academic Framework, and what evaluation of staff workload and wellbeing will run alongside implementation, as the synthesis recommends?

We request responses in the staff briefing on Friday and ask for a fuller written response by 29^th September. The appendix reproduces staff comments from the survey, verbatim and unattributed.

HSE Management Standards for work-related stress: https://www.hse.gov.uk/stress/standards/before.htm