Growth with a purpose
A warm welcome to new students and welcome back to our returning students and to all staff here on campus. We have a busy year ahead of us.
Professor Michael Farthing, Vice-Chancellor
I was very pleased to see so many new students at events over the welcome weekend, and at academic induction events and freshers’ social events across campus this week.
In line with our strategic ambitions, Sussex is welcoming record numbers of students this year - with over 3,500 new undergraduate students from home and overseas, taking our total undergraduate numbers to more than 10,000 for the first time in our history.
We are also expecting to see further growth in our postgraduate numbers as well – although firm figures take a little longer to collate. And, as befits our international traditions, we expect to exceed 3,000 overseas students on campus for the first time.
This expansion at Sussex reflects both the quality of what we offer and our long-term ambitions to expand the University.
As we discussed in developing our new strategic plan, this is growth with a purpose: to ensure that more students can benefit from the education we provide, and that our distinctive contribution to research can thrive on a sustainable basis.
As we increase our student numbers, so we are making additional staff appointments – with more high-quality faculty being appointed across the arts, social sciences, sciences and medicine.
We also have new successes to celebrate: for example, the shortlisting of our Widening Participation scheme in the Times Higher Awards 2014 is a positive endorsement of the work we have in place through our outreach activities with schools and our First-Generation Scholars Scheme.
We were also able this week to welcome new members of Council – our governing body – at our Council strategy day this week. That provided an opportunity to reflect on the strategic ambitions of the University and the latest draft of the new strategic plan for 2013-18.
I want to thank everyone – staff and students – who gave comments on the draft plan in the summer, which we will reflect in revising the plan, in particular to make clear that our ambition is to grow the University with purpose: to enhance the quality of our research and teaching, and to preserve our distinctive Sussex character.
During this term we will be developing the implementation and sharing of the plan so that all schools and professional services are part of how we move the University forward on our ambitious development path.
There are of course very important milestones from work already in place.
It is important that we continue to attend to the National Student Survey (NSS) results, which show our strengths and areas for development. Improvements this year in our scores for the library and for IT services, for example, show the positive effects of investments we have made to respond to such feedback in previous years. It is vital that we make similar improvements in how we provide academic assessment and feedback to our students.
This term will also see the finalisation of submissions to the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the culmination of work by academic colleagues and professional services teams to ensure that the quality of our research is properly reflected in this key external assessment.
We will also be continuing to improve campus services, working with a new external partner for facilities management, alongside our new catering partner. I have been pleased to see improvements starting to come through and to talk to staff now working in Sussex Food about their pride in the new services and the quality of what is offered.
Finally, the physical development of campus continues, with the refurbishment of both the Attenborough Centre and the Freeman building being undertaken this year. Our strategic plans involve significant continued development, not least the creation of a new biosciences building to support our excellent research and future teaching ambitions. I want to share more of those plans with colleagues in the weeks ahead.