Broadcast: News items

Today, 5 November, the Vice Chancellor wrote to all staff. You can read the full email below:

You may have read in the local media that there were a number of incidents involving Sussex students last Saturday night – this involved a very heavy Police presence on campus and one of our students living in the community received a £10,000 fine for egregiously breaking the Covid laws. Although the numbers of students who were involved was a small percentage of our students in the city, we are obviously concerned when the perception grows that the University is not a good neighbour.

During the last week, we have worked closely with both the Police and the local authority to prevent such events from happening again. Although, as I say, a large fine was issued, the Police are strongly committed to working with all members of the community and have given strong guidance to students about acceptable behaviours and we have reiterated this. They are also working with our security team with some evening patrols which are aimed at reassuring everyone and preventing problems from developing. Last night I joined a mixed group of our Security officers and Police on a walk around campus and was really pleased to have done so. Our Security staff are absolutely committed to student welfare: they are kind and friendly with students and trained to de-escalate situations and the Police had exactly the same approach. It was also lovely to talk to students who were out and about on a crisp November evening – although they do have much to concern them, none of the ones I spoke to ‘blame’ the University for the pandemic. For me, there were two stand-out conversations – trying to explain Bonfire Night to a bemused Lebanese student and speaking to a young woman with a suitcase who had been away for a few days but was returning to be with the friends she’d made in her flat for the lockdown period.

I got home at around 9.00 and, by chance, started watching a programme on visually impaired artists on BBC 4. I wouldn’t normally recommend TV programmes, but this one featured Professor Anil Seth from Engineering and Informatics who explained the neuroscience of perception. You can catch it via iPlayer. I love such chance encounters with Sussex academics as this, or when reading the review of Professor Margaretta Jolly’s latest book in the London Review of Books a few weeks ago, and a reminder about the intellectual depth and breadth of our great University.

Conversations this week have inevitably been dominated by the Prime Minister’s announcement of a second nationwide lockdown. If you haven’t already done so, please read in full the email sent to all staff on Tuesday by Internal Communications, which details how the University will operate during this period.

I want to update you now on this week’s Senate meeting that took place yesterday. Senate received our first detailed forecast of student numbers for this and the next five years. This was put together by our planning team in partnership with other expert teams from across the University and draws on data both from within and outside the University. Obviously, forecasts are just that, but this is our best estimate of what will be the short- and medium-term impacts of the challenges we are facing.

Our forecasting predicts a most-likely scenario alongside better and worse cases – in all three, we will be a smaller university in 2025 than we were last year.

As I outlined a couple of weeks ago, the nature of the student lifecycle, with problems compounding as cohorts move through subsequent years, means that a v-shaped recovery is extremely unlikely.

Instead, we expect to experience a sustained decline in student numbers for three or four years, followed by a slow, gradual recovery.

Given that our Sussex 2025 vision was built upon steady growth and growing surpluses to drive investments, these forecasts require us all to be mentally agile as we consider where we go from here.

We need to adjust to our new reality, which is that our focus for the next five years has to be on recovering our attractiveness to students and to continue to enhance our considerable research prowess. This will enable us to invest in the University.

To stay on a sustainable footing, we will need to work on two fronts.

First, we will need to continue to reduce our overall spending. We have made good progress over the last eight months through – for example – improved supplier arrangements and the voluntary severance scheme, but we will need to do more. We will do this with as little pain as possible, but it won’t be easy. I would like to thank everybody who took part in our recent consultation around suggested cost savings: we will share the outcome of your preferences for these hypothetical measures as soon as possible.

The other plan of action is to maximise our income potential and to do everything possible to get close to the best-case scenario set out in our forecasts.

A major part of this, which we discussed with Senate, is to boost our student recruitment efforts. Part of this will be determined by moving in the league tables (in the right direction) and critically improving on our NSS scores. However, we also have a more pressing issue at hand – and that’s making sure that the degrees we are offering are ones that people today actually want to study. Our last major review of our courses was over a decade ago and – clearly – a lot has changed since then. Some of our courses are not as popular as they once were. In fact, the students on the lower-recruiting half of our degree programmes account for just 15 per cent of our overall student body.

With this in mind, it’s important that we regularly review our portfolio.

We need to ensure that we continue to offer a stand out and distinctive offer, something that appeals to prospective students, meets their needs and the needs of the employment market. This will ensure that our courses not only continue to appeal but that the modules that underpin them continue to be relevant, successful and financially sustainable. Competition for students has never been more intense and creating a distinctive and compelling portfolio for students has never been more important.

Regularly reviewing the portfolio is very much a normal procedure in universities and really we should have been doing this every year. We have traditionally been too hesitant at doing things differently at Sussex, but we do need to be more on the front foot now.

We are currently in the first phase of this and Heads of Schools and academic colleagues had already put forward a small number of courses for withdrawal, working with professional colleagues. These changes have been approved by the Portfolio Approval Committee (PAC) and will be made to our 2021/22 prospectus.

The next phase, to be completed around Spring, will look mainly at courses for 2022/23 start. This process will almost certainly reduce complexity in our offering. We will share more information on this area of work, as it progresses.

Sussex 2025 will continue to guide us through this time. Indeed, many of the most important elements – building an inclusive University, transforming our pedagogy, living our values – do not in themselves require significant financial investment.

Rest assured, though, that even as we go through this process, the University can’t be driven by a simple, utilitarian understanding of education: a high quality higher education is good in itself and we must recommit to attract and support students from under-represented groups into University. (Learn more about this at the Widening Participation conference on 24 November).

We are also making progress on living up to the statements we made in the summer about striving for race equity at the University. Through our Race Equality Charter Self-Assessment Team, led by Saul Becker, we will shortly be surveying all staff and students in our biggest-ever data-gathering exercise on this issue. This will give us a solid foundation and a vital framework from which to address the many and multi-layered barriers that BAME staff and students face at Sussex. Please do take part in this important exercise when we send round the information.

Finally, I want to share with you an event next week – Kindfest2020 – that aligns perfectly with everything we stand for: impactful research, inclusivity, public engagement, shared values and so on. Taking place on World Kindness Day on 13 November, psychologist Robin Banerjee, Director of Sussex Kindness Research, has teamed up with the broadcaster Claudia Hammond – a Visiting Professor in the School of Psychology – to bring together the world’s top thinkers on the role of kindness in public life. There are 1,000 free tickets for Sussex staff and students.

With best wishes,
Adam