Redundancies loom at University of Sheffield over £50m funding gap as staff pass vote of 'no confidence'
Up to £23m in cuts made primarily from support staff could be made at the University of Sheffield, with hundreds of jobs on the line.
Just a month after being named runner-up as The Times’ University of the Year 2025, the Russell Group institution is reportedly preparing to offer voluntary redundancies to staff this Monday (November 18).
It comes after it came to light in September that the university attracted up to 2,200 less international students this year, or around seven per cent, and is now facing a £50m shortfall.
Now, as many as 880 members of staff have voted they have “no confidence” in Chancellor Lady Justice Rafferty, Vice-Chancellor Koen Lamberts, and the university’s executive board. The university employs 8,606 people.
The university has been contacted for a comment.
One member of staff told The Star: “The executive board are not fit to run a business, and sadly that's how universities are run now. They don't know how to hit a bottom line.
"They are uncreative too. Instead of looking at how to offer better courses or have a blue skies approach, they have gone straight to 'cuts, cuts, cuts,' with no other ideas. It's practically austerity.
"One of the pillars of the university is that we are 'all one university', but it doesn't feel like it. There is such a sense of frustration and mismanagement by the UEB among staff."
The member of staff believes a major factor behind the shortfall in international students is because the board failed to keep UoS in the ‘world’s top 100 ranking’, or the QS100.
The university fell out of the QS100 in June this year, and is now ranked 105th in the world.
This, the staff member said, “killed” its prospects when appealing to students abroad.
“The difference in attending a ‘world’s top 100’ university or not is enormously important to some international communities,” they said.
They added they felt the board had not risen to the challenge created by the UK Government’s change in policy over skilled visas, which as of April this year required students to show their first job out of university would earn at least £38,700, up from £26,200.
They added that it is widely believed among staff that the cuts will fall hardest on the university’s ‘professional services’, or back-of-office services and support staff.
It comes after the university controversially shut down its archaeology department in 2021, which was ranked the sixth best in the UK.
On Thursday, four unions on site held a combined vote of no confidence in the executive board. Out of the 944 staff who voted, nine out of 10 agreed.
Robyn Orfitelli, the chair of the joint trade unions at the University of Sheffield said in a statement: “This vote represents an unprecedented depth of feeling from staff at this university.
“It is far from clear that the extreme level of cuts to staff that management are proposing are necessary, or that alternative non-staff cuts have been fully explored.
“Staff and students deserve to see that university management are taking responsibility for their role in creating the current financial situation, rather than simply pointing to external factors while placing hundreds of staff at risk.
“This university is its staff and students, and we need our leadership team to make decisions that reflect that.”