Recruitment issues are leaving schools understaffed, impacting the student experience and compounding existing problems caused by increased student numbers, annual Faculty Quality Reports have revealed.
High student to staff ratios were a significant problem for the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (AHSS) in particular, with certain AHSS schools having “the highest ratios in the College, way out of line with our international peers”.
The AHSS report said that this places a “burden” on staff and is a “potential risk to the quality experience for the students”. The high ratios will also “prevent any significant further expansion in student numbers in the Schools in question”.
The Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) responded to “governmental and student demand for additional places in STEM courses” in 2021 by increasing their undergraduate CAO quotas and creating new postgraduate courses while “operating under reduced budgets”.
Comments from the School of Biochemistry and Immunology highlighted the risk that “increasing student numbers and insufficient grant funding” places on the quality of students’ capstone projects and that the school’s “ability to support increasing numbers of senior sophister and MSc projects without a growth in staff numbers is limited”.
It said that this risk could be mitigated if Trinity appointed new staff to the school to reach a student to staff ratio of 16 to one as outlined in College’s Strategic Plan.
The Faculty of Health Sciences said it faces “continuous requests to increase student numbers in many undergraduate health science courses”. It also said the government has asked medical schools to take an additional 20 Irish or EU students in place of non-EU students but at half the funding, which would result in an annual loss of €2 million to €3 million.
Difficulty retaining and recruiting staff was a concern raised across this year’s reports. A hiring freeze imposed on STEM schools in 2021 as an emergency measure responding to “overspends in pay budgets across many STEM schools” caused delays across the faculty .
The replacement of administrative and technical staff in STEM schools “has proven challenging when the remaining/existing staff, who are responsible for undertaking the work associated with staff recruitment, on-boarding, mentoring and training, are carrying the increased workloads arising from staff shortages”.
Certain schools, such as the School of Computer Science and Statistics, had difficulty retaining academic staff as “opportunities for career advancement either in other academic institutions or in industry are abundant”.
The STEM faculty has also struggled to recruit external examiners, citing increased workloads, the administrative burden of overseas examiners applying for a PPS number and the low payment they receive.
Some of the external examiners that the faculty did recruit returned paperwork slowly as “payment is not connected to the provision of their report”.
The Faculty of Health Sciences also reported recruitment delays and said they were a “significant impediment to the running of the schools because vacant posts were delayed and considerable time and effort was required to get approval for all new and replacement posts”.
However, the Health Sciences report also noted that the recruitment process has since been simplified and is “likely to lead to a speeding up of the process”.
All faculties also had concerns regarding the quality and availability of space. The AHSS report stated that “the faculty unfortunately does not have any additional, available space to allocate” to postgraduate taught students.
The report also acknowledged that while the Arts Building was refurbished and the appearance of the building was improved, “much of the faculty’s space needs modernisation” and “significant infrastructural work is requested to bring the building up to modern sustainability levels and to comply with Health and Safety”.
The STEM report noted that “demands on existing space are increasing and being felt more acutely in the return to on-site teaching with increased class sizes”.
“The faculty is struggling to provide additional new space/reconfigure current space to meet the demand”, it said.
The report specifically cited Goldsmith Hall as an unsuitable lecture venue, and said that the closure of food outlets and ongoing construction work in the East End of College has “resulted in a deterioration in the student experience and a lack of facilities” and “is not providing an environment conducive to learning”. Delays in accessing new spaces such as the E3 Learning foundry, which “is projected to be 12 months behind schedule”, were also noted as an impediment to quality.
In an email statement to The University Times, Trinity Media Relations Officer Catherine O’Mahony said: “We appreciate the effort that has gone into compiling these reports. All issues raised will be examined and considered in due course”.
“Since these are retrospective reports, the work has already begun and inroads have been made in addressing some of the points raised”, she added.
The Health Sciences report said that a “superficial update” to the Panoz Institute has been planned to “coincide with the marking of the benefaction and visit of the Panoz family”, but noted that there is no plan to fix a leak in the roof of the Atrium in the Panoz Institute, which is used as a teaching and social space, or the “substantial floor damage” it has caused.
The School of Nursing and Midwifery was identified as being “at risk of becoming irrelevant at a national level” due to a “lack of flexibility in the availability of teaching spaces” which has prevented the school from agreeing to the government’s requests to increase the number of EU students on nursing programmes.
Both the School of Medicine and School of Nursing and Midwifery do not currently have access to sufficien large teaching spaces to meet teaching needs. The School of Medicine also noted that it requires more lab and office spaces, while the School of Nursing and Midwifery needs additional rooms so that more tutorial groups can be created to accommodate increased student numbers.
The report also noted that the School of Dental Science and the Dublin Dental University Hospital “are now considered fully occupied”.
It also said that pharmacy students in particular have commented on a lack of social and study spaces, with the report quoting an email from a pharmacy student who said that “students have been resorting to eating their food in a bathroom or in a lecture theatre”.
The need to provide additional resources to the Student Counselling Service was also identified by some schools in the Faculty of Health Sciences. The report said that additional resources are required “to meet the demand for preventative, non-crisis sessions”.
