UTS Spent Almost $1.5m On Leadership Coach Ahead Of Mass Cuts

The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) has forked out close to $1.5 million on executive leadership coaching, more than half of which was spent only months before mass cuts across courses and staff.

Documents obtained by ABC’s Four Corners show vice-chancellor Andrew Parfitt had been employing coaching company Beyond Excellence, since 2021. About $783,000 was spent in 2024 as the university was planning significant budget cuts to deal with what they considered to be a financial crisis.

Beyond Excellence founder, Julie Birtles, was originally contracted for a six-month program, but convinced Parfitt to expand her services, which included “leadership circle feedback”, “executive transition support”, and “confidential” discussions with Parfitt’s colleagues about his leadership, with Birtles relaying “key themes” to the VC.

Included in the spending was more than $126,000 for Birtles’ travel and accomodation, with 91 airfares between Melbourne and Sydney, and more than 80 hotel reservations.

Plans to save the university more $100 million through a redundancy program dubbed Operational Sustainability Initiative were in place at the time, which anticipated 400 jobs- about 10 per cent of UTS’s workforce- would be cut, alongside 167 courses and more than 1,100 subjects.

Four Corners revealed Australian universities spent an estimated $1.8 billion in a single year on external consultants without having to disclose who they were hiring or what the money is for.

“University leaders have been cutting courses, slashing jobs and telling staff and students there was no choice,” said NTEU National President Dr Alison Barnes. “Our long-held suspicions that the financial crises driving many of those decisions weren’t real have now been confirmed. This is a catastrophic failure.

“The NTEU raised these concerns for years. Vice-chancellors didn’t want to hear it. Staff, students and the community have paid the price for their arrogance and impunity.

“Every time we look under the bonnet of universities what we see is even more rotten.”

“Not fit for purpose”

It comes as the the first findings from NSW’s parliamentary inquiry into the higher education are declared, with chair, Labor’s Dr Sarah Kaine, a former UTS academic, saying in an interim report delivered on Wednesday that the current systems for accountability and transparency were “demonstrably inadequate” and “not fit for purpose”.

The report’s four recommendations called for the Audit Office of NSW to examine the governance, finances and staff management of UTS. and for the University of Wollongong to detail its commercial activities, including those overseas. Universities should also be made to disclose consultant spending, and freedom of information laws made more transparent.

“Based on the evidence gathered by the committee to date, while institutional autonomy remains a defining feature of the sector, we are concerned that this fragmentation has diminished consistency, weakened oversight and reduced clarity in responsibility for the stewardship of public funds,” wrote Kaine in the report’s forward.

“The committee also heard evidence regarding the underrepresentation of elected academic and professional staff and students on university councils, and the growing prevalence of externally appointed members with corporate or consulting backgrounds.”

The final report is expected later this year.