Published: 11th November, 2025
The University of Leicester has begun its redundancy programme. We can now reveal the extent of “phase one” of their plans.
Film Studies is to be closed down and the staff sacked. Modern Languages is to be closed down and the staff sacked.
History will lose however many staff it takes to save £500,000 a year. Those who remain will have to organise teaching based on whoever is left. If too few History staff leave “voluntarily”, compulsory redundancies will begin in January.
Chemistry will merge with Geography, Geology & the Environment (GGE), although the term “merger” is outlawed: this is a “reimagining”. Staff involved in researching “Critical & Creative Geographies” or “Evolution & Past Environments” in GGE, and “Synthesis & Catalysis” or “Environment & Society” in Chemistry, are deemed surplus to requirements. Some of these staff have been celebrated in recent weeks for their contributions to our research, which has helped generate record levels of research income across the university.
Once the relevant staff are sacked, our university leadership will try to work out if our programmes in Geography or in Human Geography remain viable. As for our overseas programmes at Dalian, centred on our Chemistry offering, we’ll just hope for the best.
College Operations—the name now applied to large numbers of professional services staff who work primarily at School level—will see job cuts too. Not only will people across 76 posts have to apply for just 50 new roles, but those roles will be at lower grades, with lower rates of pay, once pay protection for staff moved into these roles expires. This is, in other words, a stealth de-grading of staff. Of course, these staff will be expected to deliver the functions they currently deliver—just with fewer people and for less money.
Many professional services colleagues will also move to more centralised roles, where they are then at threat from further restructuring from summer 2026 as the increasingly opaque “functional review” proceeds.
Students who decide to stay to study in areas where academic staff have been made redundant will be “taught out” by a shrinking pool of academics on teaching-focused, fixed-term contracts within dying departments. PhD students…who knows? One thing that has emerged clearly in this process is that senior management have little idea what we actually do all day—as researchers, teachers or professional services staff.
In January, the University might announce the closure of the School of Education—once it has decided whether we have a civic duty to provide educators across the region or whether this civic duty is, in fact, more of a civic whim. We expect further cuts to follow in professional services and would not be surprised to see further restructuring in academic areas, once senior management realise their current plans are unworkable—and that simply cutting staff and hoping for the best is not an actual strategy.
One group of staff has not been considered for “pre-change”, restructuring, “reimagining” or job losses: the senior leadership at the University of Leicester, led by the vice chancellor, Nishan Canagarajah. After the previous redundancy programme—in which several people were unlawfully dismissed and which apparently failed in its goal of securing the long-term sustainability of the university—he received a 14 percent pay rise, taking his basic pay to £328,000.
Now the Executive he chairs is back for more jobs—wrecking morale, damaging the reputation and long-term prospects for the university, and provoking weeks of strike action. That is why we say: no confidence in the Vice Chancellor and the University Executive he leads.
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