Professional and support staff need visibility and recognition

Security officers work in universities.

So do lab technicians, lawyers, admissions specialists, marketing professionals, committee secretaries, research managers, maintenance staff, accountants, data analysts, procurement officers.

For a number of years now, we’ve only been able to see them obliquely in sector data and sporadically in work done by employers and unions to understand sector employment. This is simultaneously a disservice to the vital work that these people do and a blunting of our ability to understand the sheer breadth and complexity of what higher education providers actually do.

The Association of Higher Education Professionals (AHEP) has conducted two 450 respondent surveys, and analysed 50 institutional reports, to give us more perspective on the changing nature of these roles. The report is on HEPI. While the headlines are encouraging (60 per cent described their day-to-day work as “good” or “very good”) this hides a lot of anxiety around change and uncertainty, and the salutary fact that three-quarters of staff report “sustained high-intensity” work – with much of this reactive and fragmented, with roles expanding without training, support, or promotion.

This will not come as news if you have spoken to staff in higher education providers at any point in the last five years or so. The fixes suggested are admirably technical and specific – working with UCEA and the trade unions to review the job evaluation framework, separating out academic staff in gender pay gap reporting, and sharing practice on workforce development. There’s also a call to fix staff data collection for people employed other than on academic contracts.

Returning HESA Staff data on what we (rather tellingly) term “non-academic staff” has been optional in England and Northern Ireland. In 2024-25, just 123 eligible providers chose to return data, while 105 opted out. A HESA “major review” of the Staff collection responded to a growing perception that we needed to know more, and an understanding that most of the information the national data would need is already collected and stored by higher education institutions in the normal course of compliance with good practice in employment.

So, starting from 2028-29 there will (at last!) be mandatory collection of “non-academic staff” data in England and Northern Ireland, and – even better – staff in this large and unhelpful bucket will be split into three better-defined categories:

• Professional staff: those employed to design, deliver or lead a range of services for an HE provider’s students, staff, systems and corporate management, or to provide those services to the wider public on behalf of the reporting provider.
• Technical staff: those who are employed to apply and advance specialized knowledge of techniques, tools, technologies and methodologies. They use this expertise to design, enable, and deliver learning and teaching, research, innovation and enterprise activities in practical and applied contexts.
• Operational staff: those who are employed to deliver the services and run the facilities to ensure the continuous and reliable functioning of the HE provider’s practical existence.

HESA has also published a list of example roles and responsibilities for each category – building on scoping work by the much-missed Lucy Van Essen-Fishman.

This is, to say the least, a hugely encouraging development. There is still more that could happen here – AHEP calls for an expansion to staff employed by subsidiary companies, a practice which is increasingly common as the sector looks to control costs. Indeed, one of the recommendations from AHEP is work on removing VAT barriers to shared services – something which would make this mode of employment more likely.

The other arm of recommendations, while aimed much more narrowly at individual employers, concerns much broader issues. Very few of our professional, technical, and operational roles are “designed” in the strictest sense – they require a grab-bag of competencies, skills, and professional qualifications (or experience) and tend to fit around the capacities of the person in post. So while it is fair to say that roles should be better designed (and, alongside this, better specified) it is not necessarily possible given the way higher education administration works.

Likewise, the idea of a career framework (that includes appropriate training for management responsibilities) would be wonderful, but relies on the idea of consistent and ongoing work which is not always something we can rely on in a rapidly changing sector. It is fair that staff should have more of a say in the systems and tools they use to do their jobs – and for that matter the design of their work.