Educational provision to fall at Napier?

Concerns have been raised about the quality of educational provision for students at Edinburgh Napier University due to the introduction of temporary library hours at the Craighouse campus.

The university have proposed to make cuts to staff and various courses within the School of Arts and Creative Industries faculty in a bid to save around £600,000, and this has been met with the formation of the Avoidance of Redundancy Committee (ARC). Yet, with these proposed cuts and the library at Craighouse unable to remain open all day due to “November staffing issues,” has the university left itself open for criticism.

The initial proposal on the 8th June 2010 outlined a deficit of around £1.3 million from within this faculty and the imbalance of staff costs to student income. This resulted in undergraduate courses being cut or plans to some being cut in the near future, including; Publishing, Culture, Media and Society, Interaction Design and Communication, Advertising and Public Relations. Courses such as Music and Journalism are to be kept and improved continually. The university also restricted recruitment, retraining, redeployment and job sharing in a bid to keep staffing costs as low as possible. Following this, documents released on the 9th September 2010 revealed the deficit had been reduced to £600,000 through natural attrition and buy-outs with limited backfill. The university stated that they were “committed to avoiding redundancies…but this cannot be ruled out at this stage.” Proposals for reduced working hours and unpaid sabbaticals have also been put forward. The minutes of each committee meeting and the dates of those which are coming up can be found here

A spokesman for the university released a statement saying:

“Despite expected reductions in public funding we remain absolutely committed to delivering high quality education for our students – including continuing to provide excellent library services at our campuses.

“The planned January 2011 opening of our redeveloped Sighthill campus and its new Learning Resource Centre, for example, will bring all of our health material under the one roof for the first time and give students access to over 300 computers and a variety of modern study spaces.”

A spokeswoman for the library also revealed that the temporary hours were due to “temporary annual leave of a member of staff and it was impossible to have the times covered.”

Only time will tell how the cuts will affect the university and to what extent there will infact be cuts.