The Teaching Roles, Institutional Locations, and Terms and Conditions of Employment of Part-time Teachers in UK Higher Education

Abstract

This article is devoted to a phenomenon of increasing relevance in contemporary higher education in the UK-the growing resort, especially noticeable since the early 1980s, to using part-time adjunct teachers for the performance of conventional teaching duties. It offers a typology to comprehend the variety of such teachers, including many who are not individually enumerated by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), and it discusses two distinctive employment relationships that differentiate between part-timers. It describes some of the existing studies of part-time teachers in UK higher education, as well as drawing analogies to the better-developed North-American literature on the equivalent topic there. The article also describes a telephone survey conducted in mid-/late-1997 among personnel officers in an achieved sample of 22 'old' and 'new' institutions in order to ascertain information on the approximate numbers of particular types of part-timer at each institution and on the terms and conditions of their employment. It presents information on the relative prevalence of various types of part-time teacher according to type of university (including whether 'old' or 'new' sector) and to further institutional characteristics. It discusses, on the basis of the collected data, sector-specific employment practices concerning part-time teachers and, from information about the terms of their employment, it assesses the degree of their contractual disadvantage in relation to conventional full-time staff.