So apparently this mythical beast does exist. You can still be a teaching and learning technician and not just purely management at grade 5. My manager was telling me about a job role advertised at CSM that had lots of technical managers up in arms because usually unless you transition to solely management and not teaching, you cannot become a Grade 5 technician. Therefore there is a ceiling to career progression. However this new job role was created because there is a demand for industry professional technicians in education (digital) who simply don’t want a job that is paid less than what industry does, so they were not attracting any applicants. This new role may encompass marking depending on the course. For example courses that are becoming more inter disciplinary and technicians are being brought in to teach students specialised skills. Skills that markers and course leaders do not hold. How can they be marking work without consultation from said specialists? Sometimes this is requested from grade 4 technicians, but where, as technicians, do we draw the line if we are not remunerated for the work?
This got me thinking about expectations and job roles, and the apparent lack of transparency between job roles. There is a lack of understanding inter departmentally what every one does, where their expertise lie, what they are interested in and what sort of research (if any) that they do. Technical job specifications are more and more competitive, Universities are asking for more and more from technical staff, a degree, a postgraduate qualification, industry experience, teaching experience..the list goes on. Yet if I look at the department as a whole, technicians are the staff who have the most PGCerts in comparison to the academics. Some course leaders have HNDs and some have PHDs, some technicians have MA’s or MSc’s. There is a large variety in qualifications. Yet technicians are perceived as lower or less than academics, and are put on pay scales to reflect that. Add to that the Visiting Lecturers who mark students work who have only industry experience and limited teaching experience, but are paid significantly higher rates, and it all feels a little bit uncomfortable.
If a technician was to be included in the marking process, where would they sit on the scale? There seems to be an emergence of the technical/academic hybrid. I am one of them. Yet for the majority of the time I sit on the lower scale, only paid extra for small bits and pieces of work. The University demands these new forms of institutional spaces because of the way teaching has evolved, yet the hierarchy still exists. There has been little reform there- we still come under ‘support’ staff under the same guise as non teaching, non student facing staff. It seems that the language needs to be changed as well as career progression, especially within the art school where technical/academic roles are becoming increasingly crossed over.
In the article Lets bridge the gap between lecturers and technical instructors in the guardian from 2016 touches on a lot of the things I have been saying and feeling. Its from 2016 yet nothing has changed! I read it and its still relevant today.
‘Technical’ is not a dirty word in industry and it should not be in higher education. Having two disjointed teaching teams is unhelpful and creates another political minefield that the students have to navigate.
Guardian, Academics Anonymous, Lets bridge the gap between lecturers and technical instructors
Is this the way forward? Change the disjointed nature of the hierarchy within teaching teams…transform it to a community of practice where the language and pay reflects job roles? I cannot change the assessment process or the structure of the university overnight but I can probe and question the way systems work, and how students and staff experience these systems.
Ooh, that’s lots of food for thought. I am a grade 5 ‘lead specialist’ technician (grade 4 = specialist technician) at CCW. The thinking behind this was two routes of leadership – grade 5 technical management route and grade 5 leadership in technical teaching, sitting them on the same level as lecturers. I’ve only met one grade 5 at Wimbledon who assesses. Should a grade 5 automatically be asked to feed into assessment?
On a side note, reading that article, I have access to the NSS Qualitative data which I find an amusing read each year as the same old same old observations come up (always praising the technical staff, disgruntled with course organisation).
Ooo how interesting! I did not know that. We are always told by management that there’s nowhere to go except management after grade 4. Who makes these rules?
So were you taken on straight away as a grade 5 or did you move to grade 5? (If you don’t mind me asking?!) I wonder then how many grade 5 lead specialist posts there are then? They don’t seem to exist at LCF. Why can they exist at one UAL site and not another?
Yes, does that mean if you are on ‘equal standing’ to an academic as a grade 5 that assessment can be asked of you on demand? Is it the job description/specification?
I also have access to NSS and have the same feelings as you. Our course got 100% student satisfaction 2 years in a row… with a lot of focus on technical praise…what happened? The course director got congratulated. I find it an odd system.
There was a restructure at CCW for the technicians, and the grade 5 posts were created in order to show there could be career progression as a specialist specialist rather than go into management. The best person to speak to is Sally Tiffin (although she’s mega busy). Perhaps you could try Stephen Meadows or Jonathan Armistead (CCW technical managers) for digging into the grade 5 lead technician reasoning. There around around 5 or lead techs, mainly at Wimbledon. The rest of the grade 5s are studio managers (we used to have Technical co-ordinators before the great restructure).
Yes, parity is annoying/a problem. The most similar role to me (Theatre Production Manager) is at CSM, and they are on a grade 4. Perhaps I just do more full on teaching/planning as well as facilitating.
Interesting! I’m a Grade 4 and would love to know how the (T&L) = Teaching and Learning is expected to manifest in what I offer students. In the Technical overhaul that happened a couple of year ago at CCW, all Grade 3 posts vanished and I had to apply for Grade 4 posts with the T&L tacked on without any sort of discussion around what that means. I had to ask someone what it meant recently whilst accessing my job-description which also states that my role is:
‘To contribute to planning, development and delivery of learning activities supporting student learning & research, liaising with Course Leaders and academic staff informally and formally for this purpose.
Actively engaging with technical teaching and the delivery of relevant technical expertise to develop & support the expressive/creative intentions of learning activities within the Studios including giving feedback to students and contributing to student informal formative assessments, with reference to appropriate learning outcomes of the Subject ethos or Course narrative.’
So far, no academics have asked me to assess anyone, formally or otherwise. I’ve not been briefed on how this will happen but for the whole of my time in my current post, It’s been a very disorganised due to changes in staffing at Head of Dept level and, of course, because of lockdown. Also, there have been two studio managers in the 18months, one is new in post as of August, so I’m hoping to get some clarity about this over the coming months.
In lockdown the technical staff were expected to teach practical skills online which was extremely challenging. At that time, i really felt the blurring of formal teaching and being a technician.