Complaints about heavy workloads in UK higher education are widespread.
Overworked academic and academic related staff are at risk of stress, burnout, and even shorter lives.
Recent surveys by the University and College Union (UCU) show that the average working week for academic staff is 51 hours—far above the legal maximum of 48 hours. UCU has long argued for better workload management, but progress has been minimal.
From my perspective, if university employees are consistently working more than 48 hours a week, their employers are potentially violating key UK Health and Safety (H&S) requirements. Workload management isn’t just a matter of institutional efficacy and well-being—it’s a pressing legal issue. Without reform, institutions and the individuals managing them could, and should, be held to account.
UK working time regulations (WTR)
Under UK law, employees are not generally permitted to work more than 48 hours a week on a regular basis. This protection stems from the Working Time Regulations (WTR 1998) that arose from the obligation to incorporate EU law. Importantly, employers are also required to “take all reasonable steps, in keeping with the need to protect the health and safety of workers” to ensure compliance. This explicitly includes keeping records that evidence managers have not required or allowed excessive work. These rules protect employees from exploitation and ensure they have a quantified, minimal ratio of work-life balance.
Crucially, employees can voluntarily choose to work beyond 48 hours a week, but this requires a formal opt-out process. The ambition of those with more capacity or willingness to work long hours therefore need not undermine protections for those with less.
University employers generally monitor working hour expectations for less senior employees, but this generally excludes academic and mid- to senior-level professional staff from these; where a reason is given, it is on the basis that these staff are “autonomous”.
This is a legitimate regulatory exception applying to those with “autonomous decision-making power”—such as managing directors—because they control their own schedules. However, not everyone in senior roles qualifies as “autonomous,” and determining who falls into this category requires honest, empirical analysis by the employer—and ideally, unions that represent their interests.
Although universities and unions have accepted the legitimacy of current practices for years, a closer look at the law and empirics raises serious concerns — pointing to serious legal risks.
The historical context
The roots of this issue go back to the 1990s, when a national academic contract was established. At that time, staff were expected to work “such hours as are reasonably necessary” to complete their duties. This contract predated the UK’s implementation of the EU’s Working Time Directive in 1998.
In 1999, the UK government introduced amendments that allowed employers to defer responsibility for work that could be delivered flexibly (such as the lesson planning and marking performed by university academics and school teachers), with only directed time being subject to the maximum limit. The government also advised employers that they were not required to inform staff of their rights. As such, HE employment practices were likely legally compliant.
However, in 2006, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that the UK’s implementation of working time protection did not comply with EU law, specifically pointing out that all working hours—both directed and flexible—must count towards the 48-hour limit. Moreover, employers were required to empower workers by making rights explicit. This ruling led to retraction of UK Government guidance and a further amendment to bring legislation into line with Europe in 2006.
Current risks
The relevant current question for stakeholders – given the epidemic of excessive working hours reported – is: are HE employers “taking all reasonable steps” to ensure compliance; and does this include undertaking the required empirical analysis to correctly determine if academics and professional service staff are legitimately excluded from protection?
My analysis finds a robust argument that generally they are not; moreover, institutions are at a range of legal risks, depending on their practices.
Low risk: A few universities have contracts that specify working hours somewhere below 48 per week, often around 37 hours per week; some also reference the WTR limits. These contracts empower staff to push back against longer working weeks, and undermine the position of others currently offering much worse arrangements. However, there is still elevated legal risk if the university doesn’t have an effective system to plan and track weekly working patterns.
Moderate risk: The majority of universities use contracts based on the old national model, which requires staff to work “as necessary” to complete their duties. While these contracts may include a vague statement about not expecting “excessive” hours, failure to acknowledge rights provided by the WTRs creates elevated legal risks where a case was successfully brought.
Higher risk: In some cases, institutions go so far as to actively deny staff the right to protection under the WTR, explicitly claiming they are “autonomous”.
Next we examine the explicit or implicit claim that autonomy justifies lack of protection. While a detailed empirical analysis is provided in my peer-reviewed paper – published in Journal of Further and Higher Education – a useful thought experiment can help clarify:
Imagine an academic(related) employee informs their manager that they will complete exam board duties, but at a time and date of their choosing, well outside the employer defined window. The likely ultimate response would be a reprimand, for choosing not to complete work according to the employer’s schedule (Otherwise, why would UCU members bother going on strike, when they could just do “business critical” work later, well within their standard Terms and Conditions (T&Cs)?)
This suggests that university staff do not enjoy the level of absolute freedom required for them to be exempt from protections of the WTR. The claim that academic and senior professional service staff are “autonomous” simply doesn’t hold up under empirical scrutiny. So there does not appear to be a justification for withholding an otherwise universal protection nor declining to take the necessary steps to promote this right.
What now?
Based on the above it feels clear to me that every single employee in HE, perhaps apart from vice chancellors, is entitled to the protection of the WTR. More importantly, university employers are bound to take “all reasonable steps” to ensure limits are not broken: specifically including, but not limited to, the obligation to keep weekly records of work done.
Now is the time to examine your institution’s employment terms and conditions (T&Cs). Senior academic and professional service managers should seek independent legal advice to assess the degree of legal risk their current T&Cs and workload modelling practices would create if a case of excessive work was upheld by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE).
Presuming my argument holds, and no legal professional has ever told me otherwise, universities must also invest in robust workload planning and staff resourcing to ensure compliance. Annualised workload models are tautologically unfit to discharge the legal obligation here. They need to be replaced by systems that plan and record weekly (which are entirely possible to create, and I’m happy to help). This shift is essential to safeguard employee health, institutional effectiveness and reduce legal risk and associated reputational damage. It is also necessary to ensure weekly working expectations set for students are also responsibly planned – but that is maybe a piece for another day.
What should unions do?
A good union plays a critical role in protecting employees. UCU should be pushing for work on changes to T&Cs of employment, starting with ensuring that the national contract is brought into line with available jurisprudence. Workload model negotiations must then acknowledge the necessity of the weekly unit of planning. If universities refuse to take action, the UCU and other unions could actively seek out and support members reporting violation of the maximum working week to take full legal action.
For individual staff members who believe they are working more than 48 hours a week, it’s time to start keeping a work diary. Whether through your union or independently, consider taking action to protect your rights under the WTR by completing this simple HSE form.
Effective workload management in HE is not just a matter of well-being or productivity—it’s a legal necessity. Universities that fail to comply with the WTRs are exposing themselves to significant legal risks. It’s time for institutions to take this issue seriously and ensure that staff are not working beyond the legal limits.
As a professional services member of staff who has watched even brilliant and efficient academic colleagues struggle with their workload, I think one issue is that even if someone is brilliant and efficient and can complete their official work within 37 hours a week, in order to achieve promotion and/or secure employment, they need to work a lot more.
Thanks Lola. I agreed entirely that many academic, and I suspect many Professional Service colleagues, need to work beyond contracted hours to mount up the list of expected achievements for promotion.
In my view, the vast majority of work required to complete tasks then submitted for promotion, very obviously counts as “working time”, not least because the work is not categorically different from the job description e.g. to produce research and “contribute to pedagogical development”. It can’t be known up front what is enough to keep your job and be promoted.
As such, the hours spent on this 1) can and should be counted as part of any comparison to the maximum working week and used in a case against an employer, and 2) must be budgeted for within the planning of workloads by managers, then allocated around other tasks with set hours (teaching and preparation) and deadlines (marking turn around following known dates of submission), on a weekly basis.
There is in my view no legal basis to exclude either this work from calculations, or academics in general from universal protections.
Arguments that it’s “too hard” are not accepted by the courts – as evidenced by the fact that hospital managers are required to provide this protection to junior doctors
Hope that helps to pass to your colleagues, who should speak to their union or seek independent legal advice if they are not in effect, being paid for all of their “work”.
I do think that there is an issue with promotion seeming to require working more than the allocated workload, for sure. However for the lower-grade promotions this can be quite easily built into a targeted workload allocation with clear goals and focuses – I think it can be identified each year what steps can be made towards a promotion. Recently I’ve found a lot of colleagues expecting it to happen very quickly though and if that’s the case then it is going to require more than the usual amount of hours.
(A wider problem for me is that promotion criteria are often not tied to the institution’s key goals. So you can do a phenomenal job of raising student satisfaction and running degree portfolios smoothly but you’d be better off ignoring this in favour of single-minded grant-chasing if you want to make Prof – grant-chasing that isn’t even esp well-reflected in REF. Of course what we’ve seen a lot recently is people who have done exactly this then losing their jobs because there’s no students left/they keep buying themselves out of teaching on an exposed and not-v-well-rated portfolio suite)…
I’ve posted more on workload on another page but I do want to reiterate my very strong scepticism of these figures from UCU. That survey suggests lecturers spend 29% of their time in a week *delivering* lectures or tutorials (or presumably seminars) – which is kind of obviously untrue I think? It’s possibly 29% of the week in *termtime* but academics seem to forget that terms are typically half of the year… They’re inevitably more intense than the non term time and they can be overwhelming, but I still find this research very hard to take seriously. At the very least it needs to be looked at alongside Trac or workload model evidence. I’m very much in favour of colleagues keeping a work diary – but this should not just be done in termtime – and should be looked at alongside what the institution’s priorities are and what the workload allocation actually was.
I would agree entirely. Self-reported hours, with no systematic and ongoing effort to log them, is a deeply methodologically flawed way to generate data on working hours. The UCU should be supporting anyone believing they work beyond contract, or close to the maximum, to keep a proper record. As you say, this must span the whole year. Moreover, this is a further reason employers are required by law to create the record; and why in the European Union the Working Time Directive has recently been updated to legally require employers to have a specific system in place for that purpose.
However, as none of this is happening in UK HE, individuals should take the initiative to protect themselves, ideally through their local union branch to create solidarity and a more powerful record.
At the very least, a personal weekly work record shows how more flexible work can be redistributed to prevent dangerous peaks.
I think that Universities would argue that the newer hour-by-hour workload allocations are doing what you suggest. I’m not sure I fully agree, and they are by their nature skewed to under-representation, but there has to be a balance between these and the ridiculous self-reporting of ‘regular’ 50-hour weeks which in fact are not the norm at all. I do think UCU rhetoric and ‘research’ on this has been quite harmful to how colleagues see their own workloads.
Hour-by-hour workload allocations are not something I am aware of. They would indeed be a practice that would help bring employers into line with the implications of Working Time Regulations. Would you be able to share more details? Directly via email if you are happy Alastair.smith@dant.oxon.org
As DoR for a large department I’ve wondered about this. I suspect many of our academic staff are pushed over the limit by time spent on service to the wider academic community: reviewing papers, journal editing, external examining for other institutions, sitting on learned society committees etc. This is not work they are directly asked or required to do by the university, but arguably is a tacit expectation of the role. Some of this work is separately remunerated by outside bodies, most of it not. Do you have any sense of whether the law would view this time part of their working hours for the university? My uneducated guess is that the externally paid work is not, but the rest is?
I’m hugely grateful for this question as it opens some fundamental and complex issues. As such, I have taken quite some time crafting an answer. I hope it is useful to you and others interested in taking concrete steps as part of this current period of tumultuous reform.
1) Whatever the conclusions draw to this question, it remains the case – in my reasoned and strongly evidenced opinion (Smith 2024) – that university staff are currently denied Health and Safety protection to which they are legally entitled. Given this, university institutions, and the individuals involved in their management, are likely at significant legal risk. The priority should be to neutralise this fundamental risk and reduce potential harm to our most vulnerable colleagues.
As such, I believe it would be pragmatic for you to establish a written record that you have raised a concern about WTR compliance with your Department Head and raise these specific questions in relation to workload recording and modelling in your institution. This helps distance yourself from what I believe could be some level of personal liability, given your formal role in influencing the duties allocated to individuals etc. I would hope your Departmental Head would then do the same: thus, shifting the formal consideration to those most responsible for dealing with any potential legal and criminal oversight. Your university should have a legal team with sufficient expertise to address this issue and your specific question – and I believe posing the question to them should be a priority.
2) Taking an equally lay interest in the questions posed however, my understanding is that we encounter a complex set of considerations.
Starting at the most peripheral knowledge to the question, but of which I am most confident: the law states employees cannot work more than a maximum limit; it’s not only that an employer cannot force them to work more, but that they have a responsibility to actively ensure they don’t (ELA 2024).
Therefore, if an employee works part-time for one university, e.g. sessional lecturer, and part-time for another employer, both employers are equally legally responsible to ensure the maximum working week is not exceeded, both are equally at risk from a successful complaint and both should have oversight of all the employer hours worked Therefore, in my view, universities and departments should ensure they understand the working patterns, and also the contractual nature of other work done by, particularly part-time, and specifically sessional colleagues.
Aligning more closely with the examples stated in the question, self-employed work, such as might be the case for independent consultancy or external examination, could potentially be viewed as legitimately falling outside of the employers’ count of hours. This is because the individual might be considered to have “total autonomy” over the number and distribution of self-employed hours worked*.
However, I believe there is alternative and preferable approach to take to the above example, which can be further considered alongside any external work, be it renumerated by a third party of not. Overall, my conclusion is that it would be wise for you and other administratively responsible academics to include any and all such work as part of working hours, as the best way to minimise legal risk.
My reason is that one part of the definition of what constitutes “work for the employer” is assessed in reference to the number of contracted working hours. There is clear cut case law that hours of elective work, done outside of contracted hours, certainly those performed from home, should not be counted.
However, most UK universities define working hours as “all those required to fulfil the duties expected” (without any specification of a limit), and as such, they specifically talk themselves out of access to the possible defence of staff “working after hours”. We then move to the second most tried and tested criteria to establish working time – that being where the tasks are undertaken at the behest of the employer’s instruction.
Here, my understanding aligns with yours that it’s not as simple as asking if a specific task has been directed e.g. it’s not able asking if there is an email, asking a colleague to consider applying for an external position. I would however go further, and suggest that while some tasks might be done as they are reasonably described as resulting from “a tacit expectation”, many are actually directly and explicitly linked to the formal codification of duties established via – often poorly thought out – job descriptions.
To start with a likely more identifiable situation, where generating research (income) is specified in a job description, there is a broad expectation, and therefore instruction, to produce research and apply for grants. I believe that where an employee worked beyond the maximum working week and brought a case counting many hours doing research and applying for grants, those hours would be accepted, and the employer could be found in breach of their obligations. To circle back, this would be especially true where the employer has taken no meaningful steps to record workings hours – and even worse still, where it has illegitimately claimed, the employee is not entitled to protection to justify the absence of such a record.
Furthermore, I believe while its less readily obvious, the same principles could be used to convincingly argue the case where a job specification includes a catch all expectation to contribute to scholarship, or promote the aims and objectives / reputation of the university etc. Here, for me, there is an explicit instruction to do work such as refereeing and participate in external roles – such as acting as an editor or fellow of an honorary committee – as part of paid duties. These tasks are widely accepted as part of the culture of working as an academic in a university (as evidenced by the contrasting situation where a Professional Serviced Colleagues tried to make a claim based on applying for grants, and where this is neither in the job description or the tacit cultural expectation). Therefore, I believe that a working time claim that counted these hours might be upheld, and therefore, these hours should be included in your department consideration of working hours for recording and workload purposes.
4) In addition to job descriptions, I believe it is also relevant to consider promotion criteria as part of explicit instructions to employees. I would make this argument on the basis that these are stretch duties. It can be argued that an employee chooses to seek promotion, but as pay increments are linked to promotion, the employer sets clear incentive to pursue this (especially against a background in which base wage increases have failed to track inflation – and wage levels are the choice of the employers). Moreover, promotion criteria are largely the job description which the employer then expects of the employee when they are paid at the higher grade. All this work after all, it ultimately valued by the employer in the pursuit of its stated interests. Indeed, universities, like all other employers, can’t instruct or use its resources to reward work not aligned to their founding and governing documents: to do so is a fundamental failure of compliance with the wider legal frameworks that establish and govern them; and like charities, trustees and managers risk personal prosecution if they allow money to be invested in things not aligned to the articles of association.
I hope that helps and happy to talk more if that’s useful: Alastair.smith@sant.oxon.org