Today (14 February 2022), Interim Vice-Chancellor David Maguire wrote to all staff. You can read the message below:

Dear colleague,

Towards the end of 2021, I outlined our five priorities for my tenure as interim Vice-Chancellor. These are progressing the Governance Effectiveness Review, implementing Size and Shape, taking forward the Education and Research Investment Programme, improving the student experience and enhancing our University community.

Last week, I updated Professors on these five areas and I want to share the good progress with you today.

You may recall that we immediately implemented 15 of the 36 recommendations made by the externally-led 2021 Governance Effectiveness Review. The remaining 21 have now been divided among three working groups, looking at relaunching Senate, enhancing Council and an Effectiveness Oversight Group. In the meantime, we want to make it much easier for everybody to understand how governance works. To support this, we are revamping and simplifying our web pages and, later this term, will be sharing with you updated role descriptors for Senate, Council and the Vice-Chancellor. If you would like to deepen your understanding of how the University is governed, we will shortly be sharing details of a webinar you can book onto.

Thanks to the hard work of all involved, the Size and Shape programme has now moved into the implementation phase and most of it will be achieved through ‘business-as-usual’ processes, without requiring redundancies. Good progress has been made in rightsizing some of the schools that had got out of kilter with long term systemic changes in the external environment. There is still significant restructuring occurring in some Professional Services divisions and I want to acknowledge the effect on those teams and individuals while this is concluded. A key achievement has been to ensure better long-term planning, so that one-off programmes like this are, hopefully, not needed in the future.

Overall, the Education and Research Investment Programme has got off to a good start with some action already evident on the ground. We have also begun a series of webinars to explain the detail of the programme. The first of these, in January, focused on teaching and learning related investments and you can watch it back on our website. In the coming weeks and months, similar webinars will cover the investments we are making to improve our research, digital and physical infrastructure. We are also developing a set of web pages, to keep you updated as the transformative programme progresses over the next four years.

Our student-focused work is progressing well. More than 80 colleagues shared their ideas for improving student assessment at our Pedagogic Revolution symposium in January. We are now setting up special groups to take this forward, which is a vital component of our work to improve the student experience.

The current National Student Survey (NSS) is now live, with around 35% completion. Please do encourage all other final-year students to have their say. In a related strand of activity, we are currently employing 445 Student Connectors from groups under-represented in higher education and it is particularly rewarding that nearly all (98 per cent) recently-graduated Connectors achieved a first or 2:1 in their degree. We are planning additional investment into our student community, with a new student-voice platform included in our Education and Research Investment Programme.

Many people have told me how much they appreciated Professor David Ruebain’s article last week on our vision for culture, equality and inclusion at the University. If you haven’t yet read it, I encourage you to do so. What has been clear over recent months is that we must get better at listening to one another, being tolerant of other’s views and putting structures in place to allow for listening and allyship. David will share more about this as the programme develops. It will be crucial that we all play our part.

We will shortly be organising our spring-term UEG staff forum and I hope to speak there in more detail about these issues, as well as others which are important to you.

Meanwhile, with Spring on its way I sense a growing optimism about our future.

With best wishes,

David Maguire
Interim Vice-Chancellor