University of Newcastle plans to change the way it operates in Singapore

Vice Chancellor, Professor Alex Zelinsky AO, said UON expected to enrol about 25 per cent fewer international students in 2021 than it did this year.

"While some [international students] are enrolling online with the hope of coming to Australia later in 2021, we'll seek to do the teaching offshore," Professor Zelinsky said.

"We had a partnering arrangement in Singapore and now we're going to move to a Private Education Institution, I think it's called PEI, which allows us to have private university status and we can take students."

UON established its existing Singapore offering "as a wholly-owned entity of the university" in 2006 and offers degrees through its partner institutions, PSB Academy and BCA Academy.

Professor Zelinsky said the UON Council approved the business case to become a PEI in August and the institution had started working with the Singaporean government, which he said had encouraged UON to apply for the new status.

"Primarily what we used to do is effectively licence our courses, we would provide staff there to oversee the quality of it, but the teaching and delivery was done in partnership with a partner, who recruited the students, helped deliver our content to them and which we oversee with our staff and then so basically it's like a 75, 25 revenue split where we get 25 per cent.

"Once you step into the region and start to become a provider yourself, you can then start to get more of the revenue. It's as simple as that, more risk more revenue."

He said it was "exactly right" to see the move as an insurance policy in the event of future pandemics.

He said UON hoped to receive approval to become a PEI in the first half of 2021.

"Then you start to build up on students, but it will take several years to build those student numbers up, so we don't expect Singapore to be a big revenue spinner for the university for at least three or four years," he said.

"We've got close to 2000 students in Singapore so we hope we could double or treble those numbers over time. The thing to point out is that it's not going to [give] the university a balanced budget in 2021, it's a longer term strategy we're investing in."

Professor Zelinsky said while changing its operation in Singapore may grow revenue in the long term, UON still needed to focus on minimising its current revenue losses and reducing its costs.

He said his mid-year forecast of a $35 million loss of revenue had been buffered by enrolments in short courses in the second half of the year, but was still sitting at around $25 million.

UON introduced a series of cost saving measures this year, including an early retirement scheme; a course optimisation program that saw it consolidate or discontinue 530 subjects; a restructure of its faculties into colleges, schools and divisions; and pausing its $200million STEMM building project at Callaghan.

UON also suggested delaying salary increases and increments, but were not able to secure agreement to make the necessary variation to enterprise agreements.

UON also directed all staff to take five days leave at Easter. The Fair Work Commission said last month a clause in enterprise agreements permitted UON to make the direction, but this wasn't reasonable within the Fair Work Act.

UON agreed at the outset of arbitration its direction was not permitted for academic staff at all, or for professional and teaching staff who were forced into negative leave balances. UON agreed to recredit or repay these staff.

UON has since decided to also recredit all professional and teaching staff, but will also appeal against the FWC decision, which Professor Zelinsky said could take more than a year.

He said all staff taking a week of leave would have saved UON about $6million.

"We negotiate our enterprise agreements with the unions who represent staff, staff then vote it up, it then gets registered with Fair Work Australia so they verify the agreement is valid," he said.

"So then using a clause which has been struck out by a commissioner saying it's against the act is well, it's a big call, so we really need to get clarity on that.

"What we don't want to do is get into the business of crediting people, uncrediting people, so we're just saying, you know what this is a very complicated thing, we don't want to penalise the staff, and we're just crediting it and then appealing the decision, whichever way it goes we then move on."

He said he'd received about 50 approaches and about 50 emails from staff who don't want to be recredited "because they want to help the university".

"This is one of the things that we're very grateful if people do voluntarily put up their hand - without any coercion from management, I'm not trying to say do this, I'm not saying that at all - it's people in their own right because they feel they took the holidays and had the break and did it because they wanted to have a break."

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