The University of Wolverhampton has inadvertently revealed the identities of staff facing redundancy after an apparent error in its own communications. It's the kind of mistake that would be an awkward internal apology on a normal day. During an active redundancy process, it's something else entirely.
13,300
UK university jobs lost sector-wide in 2024/25
What happened
- Times Higher Education reported on 26 August 2026 that Wolverhampton had accidentally exposed which staff were at risk of redundancy.
- The disclosure happened through the university's own communications, before staff had been formally or individually notified through the correct process.
- The number of roles at risk hasn't been confirmed in reporting so far.
UCU's reaction
The University and College Union didn't hold back. "When you're putting staff through redundancy, maybe don't accidentally CC everyone into the same email," UCU wrote on Facebook, adding that Wolverhampton "revealed the identities of staff at risk of losing their jobs in one spectacularly grim admin error" and that "you genuinely couldn't make it up." The post drew well over 100 reactions and dozens of shares within a day.
The GDPR problem
This isn't only an employment law story. Accidentally disclosing the identities of staff at risk of redundancy to people who weren't meant to see it is very likely also a personal data breach under UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. Depending on scale and sensitivity, the university may have had to assess whether it was reportable to the ICO within 72 hours, and whether affected staff needed to be told directly that their data had been compromised. That sits alongside -- not instead of -- the university's normal duty to consult properly on the redundancies themselves.
Wolverhampton isn't the outlier -- it's the symptom
Higher education is making a genuine meal of managing this moment. The numbers behind that:
- Roughly 13,300 jobs lost across UK higher education in 2024/25 -- about 3% of the entire sector workforce, in a single year.
- £303 million spent on severance payouts, up 71% year on year.
- 105+ UK institutions currently running some combination of redundancy programmes, voluntary severance schemes, or course closures.
We've dug into why this is happening sector-wide in our full breakdown of the HESA data -- worth reading if you want the bigger picture, not just this week's headline.
If you've been personally affected by this -- at Wolverhampton or anywhere else in the sector -- we'd genuinely like to hear from you. Drop us a DM on LinkedIn or Facebook; we treat every message in confidence.
