Fractional teaching staff are teaching staff who are not on full time contracts. They are your tutors and lecturers, working as Graduate Teaching Assistants, Teaching Fellows and Senior Teaching Fellows. Some of them prepare new courses from scratch and give lectures and tutorials to 100-200 students, a full time job for which they receive part-time pay. They teach you, mark your coursework, meet you in office hours.

They are not paid for the full hours they work, so that some of them are not paid the London Living Wage.

This exploitation of fractional staff is unacceptable. Moreover, it is to the detriment of SOAS academia and its students by negatively impacting teaching quality, academic research and student experience. Students are now paying £9,000 a year, yet SOAS is increasingly hiring teachers on precarious contracts, whereby they are only paid for half, or even less than half, of the hours they actually work. This amounts to poverty pay.

No one in our institution should be on poverty pay.

Many fractional staff have been refusing to carry out unpaid work, which includes essay marking, answering emails, and office hours.

Both fractional staff and students are suffering from SOAS management’s refusal to pay fair wages.

At this crucial time of the year students need their marked essays before their exams, and require access to their teachers. SOAS management needs to pay our teachers so that they can teach us and provide us with the support we need.

We, the students of SOAS, call on Paul Webley, our Director, to end the exploitation of fractional staff and the negative impact their lack of pay is having on our education, by paying the fractional staff for the full hours they work.