Ageing workforce in non-science fields ‘not good news’ for UK

Some social science and humanities fields could be missing out on key perspectives because of ageing academic workforces, with a lack of funding potentially preventing younger scholars joining disciplines such as education, it has been warned.

Data from the latest Advance HE statistical report on equality in UK higher education show more than a third of academic staff (36.4 per cent) in non-science disciplines are aged 51 or over, compared with 26.7 per cent in science, engineering and technology.

In some social science and humanities disciplines, the proportion is more than 40 per cent, such as health and community studies (41.7 per cent), social work and social policy (44.6 per cent) and education (50.6 per cent).

Although these are areas with strong links to professional practice, with researchers often embarking on a PhD after a career in the relevant sector, Nick Johnson, chief executive of the British Educational Research Association (Bera), said funding could still be playing a role in his discipline.

“The later, often second career start means that education will always be proportionally older than other disciplines. Education also tends to have far more part-time staff than other disciplines,” he said.

“But we also think this is due to a reduction in funding in the last decade or so – particularly doctoral funding, which we think is down about a third.”

Giulio Marini, a lecturer in the UCL Institute of Education’s Social Research Institute, said that for both teaching and research, having an imbalanced academic workforce was “not good news”.

“Together with the issue of diversity as a whole…to have younger staff means to have more staff more in line with students and society,” he said. “To have few older staff members would also be detrimental…but this is not the scenario where we are.”  

Dr Marini said academic workforce trends suggested it was “simply becoming harder to get a permanent, stable, recognised position in academia”, with a longer “rite of passage” for early career researchers. “I would be in favour of giving more often [a] secure position at entry stage, namely and typically at the wake of doctoral attainment.”

Tatiana Fumasoli, director of the UCL Centre for Higher Education Studies, said another possibility was to make disciplines like education more “academic” and less tied to professional practice so it was easier for researchers to enter at a younger or more junior level.

However, she pointed out that “in doing this, the practice-based dimension of the field would lose importance and this would have implications in the type of knowledge education as a field can develop”.

If the workforce in the discipline did become too slanted towards seniority though, Professor Fumasoli said this itself could “mean that new theories and approaches take more time to emerge, since existing senior academics generally tend to be less innovative”.

Vanessa Cuthill, director of research at the British Academy, said the demography of the academic workforce was an issue it “monitors closely” and it offered “funding schemes that are both very flexible in the type of research activity supported and are open to researchers at any career stage”.

It also recently launched an Early Career Research Network that “will offer support in building successful careers” to help harness “researchers’ potential to become our subjects’ future leaders”.

simon.baker@timeshighereducation.com