University staff warn tutorials overloaded

“A survey of more than 4,000 university staff has found that class sizes have increased to unacceptable levels in the last few years. The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) National Class Sizes Survey has found that the proportion of tutorials with 30 or more students has doubled since 2019. At the same time, the number of tutorials of optimal size (between 10 and 19 students) has halved to just nine per cent of overall classes. NTEU national president Dr Alison Barnes said the data doesn’t come as a surprise to the sector. “This report blows the lid off a crisis that university management and the federal government have been ignoring for too long,” she said. “The class size explosion is being felt at campuses nationwide. The real-life consequences are unmanageable workloads with students ultimately paying the price. The report emphasised that it is becoming impossible for academics to manage the larger classes. One respondent said they couldn’t connect with all the students and “many fell through the cracks.” “University staff know what good teaching looks like,” Dr Barnes said. “They are being systematically prevented from delivering it. We are asking dedicated academics and tutors to teach classes twice and three times the size they know works, so it’s no surprise students feel unsupported and outcomes decline.” The report also found that there is a workload issue across the sector. Almost 90 per cent of permanent staff members reported an increase in unrecognised work, while more than 80 per cent of sessional and casual staff said they were not being paid for all their work. “It’s killing me. I’ve been up regularly at two or three am working on stuff as well as all weekends and nights,” one respondent said. The NTEU is calling on the Labor government to abolish the Job Ready Graduates package, linking it to the class-size explosion, and to restore Commonwealth funding to universities. “Job Ready Graduates was an abject failure and everyone knows it,” Dr Barnes said. “It cut funding to universities and gave them no choice but to pack more students into fewer classes. One year into its second term, the federal government has still not replaced it.“

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