petition is admissible and will be referred to the Committee for consideration. He will be in touch shortly to confirm when our petition will receive initial consideration. We are allowed to add further information, so have added the following statement:
On 27th July Cardiff University Council decided to continue with the redundancies in LEARN. Contrary to recent publicity, the university has now cut all its humanities provision within the department. They say they will provide some 40 – 50 unspecified humanities courses in the New Year, but this is only on a trial basis. This approach offers no real commitment towards or strategic vision for the provision of adult education courses across a broad range of subjects and denies thousands of students across south-east Wales access to the life-changing opportunity higher education should be.
Humanities tutors who had planned and prepared courses due to start this September have now been dismissed and further redundancies are to be announced in October, when the number of co-ordinating lecturers in Humanities and Welsh is to be cut from 4 to 1. The effect of these cuts on technical and support staff at the Centre is yet to be determined.
Cardiff University Council went ahead with this decision despite massive pressure from the Assembly, and a clear public concern over the provision of education rather than profits. It is also important to remember that these redundancies were created because a number of hourly paid tutors sought their statutory rights and equality. Sadly hundreds of them have now been dismissed for this.
The Campaign to Save Lifelong Learning regrets the fact that the university has chosen to ignore its recommendations and those of so many Assembly Members who called on it to "suspend their plans for twelve months and to fully engage with trade unions and staff to agree a managed process of change over a reasonable timespan to protect the maximum number of jobs and courses and mitigate adverse effects of any cuts."
