The report also recommends that staff’s working hours be limited largely to a system of “contracted teaching hours”, with monitoring systems be put in place, ensuring as little overtime as possible. It also suggests the possibility of a fixed number of annual working hours for the teaching staff, being set at the start of each year.
Although the report comes down hard on the college’s staff, it also promotes the role of “outside assistance” in the college. In order to address the reported deficit of £6.7million in 2007/2008, the college has been asking staff to volunteer for redundancy for some time, and has admitted to losing staff it would find very hard to replace through this.
Overall the report promotes the idea of running the college like a business. The principle of the college being a public institution for supporting and educating the community is ignored, in favour of cost cutting. It fails to criticise any senior management staff or bodies such as the DEL and instead focuses on the reduction of jobs and courses.
"It really beggars belief that trade union leaders would have the brazenness to propose to low and middle income public sector workers that they should agree, not just an acceptance of the savage wage cuts already meted out, but ‘revolutionary’ measures that can have a further devastating effect on the incomes and working conditions of those workers.
One year on from the killing of two British soldiers at Massereene barracks in Antrim and the shooting of a PSNI officer in Craigavon, attacks carried out by dissident republican groups have become more frequent, sophisticated and deadly.
With towering levels of unemployment, education cuts and (for those lucky to find work) squeezing of already adequate wages, young people are being hit hardest by the recession. Whilst the percentage of young people aged 18-24 officially unemployed in Northern Ireland rises above 17% (a further 62,000 16-18 year olds are unemployed) the Tory/Lib Dem coalition government continues to spend approximately £2million pounds a day on bombing Libya rather than creating jobs for young people.