Coventry University staff fear job losses

Concern that Coventry University could close two of its health research centres has triggered protest from staff.

The university has confirmed that it is consulting with a number of staff at two centres. According to the University and College Union, plans being consulted on include the possibility of closing down the Centre for Advances in Behavioural Science and the Centre for Innovative Research Across the Life Course.

This could lead to 53 staff being made redundant and a further six being moved into a planned Centre for Intelligent Healthcare, said UCU. “We’ve seen the university reorganise itself in the past and some of those reorganisations have been unnecessarily disruptive to staff and the work they’ve been doing,” a spokesman for Coventry University UCU told Research Fortnight. “But we’ve never seen anything on this kind of scale with such a substantial amount of staff at risk of redundancy.”