President's weekly update
3 September 2015
Many of you will have seen notification of changes to our IT Services, further information on these changes can be found at:
August was of course a very busy time for our many staff who are involved with confirmation and clearing for applicants hoping to study with us in the forthcoming academic year. This year we had far more interest from prospective applicants than in previous years - admissions staff took over 5,000 calls on the day A level results came out and we had over 100,000 ‘hits’ on our website. At this stage recruitment looks healthy. Numbers are never certain until students register and arrive, with final numbers being confirmed at the HESES census date on 1 December, but it looks as though we will meet or slightly exceed our targets for home undergraduate students and will be slightly below target for home/EU post-graduate taught students. Overseas student recruitment is even more difficult to predict accurately at this stage, but to date it appears that we are likely to meet or slightly exceed targets for undergraduate and post-graduate taught overseas students.
Also in August, it was pleasing to see an increase in our results in the National Students Survey of satisfaction from 85% to 86%, while the results for the sector overall remained static at 86%. A number of areas at our University showed marked improvement and had scores of over 90% satisfaction, while a few areas showed disappointing results. You can find out more about our performance at:
However it was disappointing that we fell back three places in the Shanghai Jiao Tong academic ranking of world universities to number 41 globally. This was due to a very small decline in several of the categories of assessment and you can read more here:
A number of senior colleagues and I have been working with the City on the Greater Manchester submission to the Comprehensive Spending Review. Of concern is the fact that all non-protected departments (which includes the Department of Business Innovation and Skills that provides almost all of our government funding) have been asked to submit plans for cuts of 25% and 40%. A 25% cut in our funding from HEFCE would be about £28 million per annum and 40% would be approximately £45 million per annum. There are also concerns about international student recruitment in the future given the recent economic changes in China and much publicity about UK immigration. Like any responsible organisation, we are modelling different scenarios and this reinforces the importance of growing alternative sources of income and of securing efficiencies across the University.
You may have seen the very welcome news that we were one of a small number of universities to be awarded the Race Equality Charter Mark. Congratulations to Patrick Johnson and his colleagues who worked on this. Now we have to deliver on our plans for improved diversity. You can find out more at:
Yesterday was the launch of ‘Health Innovation Manchester’ which is the body that brings together the Manchester Academic Health Science Centre (MAHSC) and the local Academic Health Science Network. The University is playing a major part in this which will be a key component of ‘Devo Health’.
Over the summer I made a short trip to Cape Town in South Africa to discuss opportunities for research and teaching collaboration. I met the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Town, saw some of their distance learning provision and met with Professor Martin Hall, formerly Vice-Chancellor of the University of Salford and now back in Cape Town. I also met the South African Minister for Science, who will be speaking in Manchester at ESOF next July (the South Africans are strong supporters of ESOF), several senior staff from the Ministry for Science, the British Council, other universities and the British Consulate. I spent several hours at the office for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). The main telescopes for SKA are in the deserts in South Africa and Western Australia and our Jodrell Bank Observatory hosts the headquarters.
In addition to our Whitworth Art Gallery getting on to the short list for the prestigious Stirling Prize for architecture, three of our buildings (the Whitworth, our new Cancer building opposite The Christie and the National Graphene Institute) feature on the short-list of the six best new buildings in Manchester. You can find out more at:
Sir Mark Richmond visited the University and had lunch with me. He was Vice-Chancellor of the Victoria University of Manchester from 1981 to 1990. We talked about the many changes in scale and ambition which the University has undergone and recalled the 1980’s as times of major cuts to universities. I’ve had a number of meetings with visitors to the University over recent weeks, including Mike Blackburn who is Chair of the Greater Manchester LEP and Fiona Fox, Director of the Science Media Centre in London.
I hope that you have all been able to take a break over the summer, but I know that the summer is also an important time for many staff to undertake research, attend conferences and prepare for the new academic year in a few weeks.