While bringing the joint union blog back online, we came across posts written during the university’s last major redundancy consultation in 2011.

Reading them now is striking. Many of the concerns raised by staff at that time will sound familiar: questions about financial assumptions, uncertainty around recruitment forecasts, and the importance of exploring alternatives to compulsory redundancies.

Of course the context today is different, and universities across the sector are facing significant challenges. But the underlying principles remain the same. Staff expect transparency, meaningful consultation and serious engagement with proposals that could avoid permanent job losses.

Institutional memory matters. The conversations we are having today are not new, and there is much we can learn from how staff and unions engaged with similar challenges in the past.