Revolts have broken out in some of Britain’s leading universities against the growing use of postgraduate students as cheap teaching alternatives to full-time staff.

Graduate teachers at the London School of Economics are in dispute with management about what they claim are low pay and long hours caused by having to teach increasing numbers of undergraduates.

At Manchester University, students have complained that growing amounts of teaching by master’s and PhD students can mean undergraduates go a whole year without meeting a lecturer face-to-face.

Clashes about postgraduate teaching are the latest evidence of militancy over standards as universities struggle to cope with student numbers.

This month vice-chancellors were criticised over standards by the universities select committee and, among other advice, told to give more information to applicants about who would be teaching them.

Universities often promote themselves using the names of eminent research staff without telling applicants that they will be taught largely by students.

On some courses staff are seen only in lectures attended by hundreds of students, while all seminars and tutorials are taken by postgraduates.

The Higher Education Policy Institute has found that about 30% of seminars and tutorials in leading universities are taught by postgraduates.

Graduate teachers do the work to pay their living costs, freeing academics to conduct the research on which university funding largely depends.

The issue has been brought to a head by graduates at the LSE who have presented a report to the school claiming that while they work an average of 502 hours to teach a typical 20-week course, they are paid for 289 hours.

One graduate said her pay worked out at about £13 an hour, compared with £10 for a domestic cleaner in London, and a third of what she could expect to earn at University College London nearby.

The postgraduates warn in their report: “Many PhD students want to become academics so universities can rely on a willing pool of students willing to take on this work at rock-bottom prices. If graduate teaching assistants are not paid properly and have to juggle several jobs and their studies, students are going to suffer.”

The LSE was one of the worst performers in this month’s National Student Survey, ranked 132 out of 154.

Emmanuel Akpan-Inwang, welfare officer at the LSE students’ union, said: “Student numbers have grown from 3,000 in 1992 to 8,000 now.

“University should be about academic experts passing down knowledge to the next generation. Undergraduates aren’t against teaching by graduates but they do want to see more of senior academics.”

At Manchester, Sarah Wake-field, who studies politics, philosophy and economics and is on the students’ union council, said teaching by graduates was “a big issue”. “In my first two years I have had no tutorial time with a lecturer,” she said. “My class in 20th-century analytic philosophy was taken bya student specialising in aesthetic philosophy who was having to learn alongside us.”

An LSE spokesman said it was “investing an extra £2m a year in improving teaching”. He said: “The [use of graduate teachers] is not increasing. There were the equivalent of 69 full-time in the 2008-9 academic year. The previous year it was 71. The LSE is recruiting about 25 extra lecturers.”

Alan Gilbert, Manchester’s vice-chancellor, said yesterday in a BBC interviews that he was not satisfied with the quality of undergraduate education in his university and that it was “too impersonal”.

A Manchester spokesman said it was considering changes to its use of graduate teachers.

Additional reporting: Liz Lightfoot

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