ON November 17, the university of Sheffield branch of the university and College Union (UCU) will commence 16 days of strike action.

In recent years, this is unfortunately not an unusual occurrence. Since I began as a PhD student at Sheffield in autumn 2023 there have been two previous rounds of strike action, the most recent of which focused on combatting compulsory redundancies.

This industrial action has not taken place in a vacuum. Over the past few years there have been a multitude of “change management” initiatives which have been pursued by the governing body of the university.

The nebulous nature of the phrase “change management” makes it unclear what change might look like. For the avoidance of doubt, it means an eye-watering reduction in staffing numbers, closure of courses and an increase in workload across the institution.

On paper, the more recent initiatives have been a response to a wider sectoral funding crisis caused by an outdated funding model which necessitates high recruitment of international students.

In reality, they are part of a management strategy which views continuous violent change and as a reasonable way to run a university.

In October 2024, the university reported that a drop in international student applications would result in a £40-60m loss in income. This equated to a 23.9 per cent decrease in international student recruitment from the previous academic year, making Sheffield the worst-hit university in the Russell Group in terms of a drop in international recruitment.

The reasoning for such a dramatic loss is where it gets interesting. The vice-chancellor, Professor Koen Lamberts, mainly put the blame on government immigration policies and wider geopolitical issues which caused seismic shifts in the recruitment market.

Sheffield UCU has another explanation: the university had, as recently as summer 2023, restructured and effectively gutted the recruitment and marketing team. Soon after, the university dropped out of the coveted QS Top 100 Universities ranking, which is used as a key metric for international students in choosing which institutions to apply for. It seems highly unlikely that these events are unrelated.

To mitigate some of its losses, the university announced a voluntary severance scheme (VSS), pursuing savings in “staff costs” across the 2024/25 academic year. This was to be open to vast swathes of the professional services (PS) teams, as well as targeted academic areas.

Upon its conclusion, the VSS amounted to at least 300 staff leaving the institution across the 2024/25 academic year.

Alongside this, the university was merging various academic departments into a smaller number of “schools,” and restructuring all of the PS teams across these, directly affecting around 800 staff, displacing some and making others reapply for the jobs they had been doing successfully for many years.

The outcome of this process was unsurprising, with PS team members left at risk of compulsory redundancy. The branch, which had been expecting such an outcome, was prepared to take action.

With a strong mandate from our membership to protect jobs, we called nine days of strike action beginning in late April 2025 with the intention of disrupting the last few weeks of the teaching timetable.

It only took three days until we received an offer from the university: they were willing to postpone any compulsory redundancies until the December 31 2025, in return for us not calling any more strike action on our mandate.

This offer was tentatively accepted by the membership in the knowledge of the fact that this was only a temporary win. Come the end of the year, those who had not been slotted into a role would still be at risk of compulsory redundancy.

The branch was fully prepared for the fact that yet another industrial action ballot may need to take place over the summer. The necessity of this fact was reinforced when management announced yet more reviews of some academic departments along with yet another VSS.

By this point, staff confidence in the university’s management body was at rock bottom, so the branch knew that securing another mandate was within reach. Through a co-ordinated “get the vote out” (GTVO) campaign, using the dedicated pool of committee members, reps and the lay membership, we successfully passed the ballot threshold and returned a strong mandate for action.

During our GTVO, we emphasised the ideological nature of the university’s plans to cut staff, rather than weather the next few years by drawing on the institution’s healthy financial reserves, presenting an alternative vision as a reminder that trade unionism is not always about being on the defensive.

Now, with the support of the student body, who are actively organising a compensation campaign to heighten the pressure on management, and a clear message that staff cuts are ideological rather than necessary, the branch is ready to take 16 days of action to protect jobs, fight against spiralling workloads and address the scourge of fixed-term contracts.

Jack Davidson is Sheffield university UCU committee member and post graduate researcher officer at the School of Mathematics.