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President's weekly update

30 July 2015

As you may be aware, IT Services is making significant investment to deliver strategic change that will enable it to operate more flexibly and adapt to the University’s changing needs. In order to achieve this, a staff reduction in some areas of IT Services is required through a voluntary severance scheme and you can find out more about this at: 

I’ve been involved in several meetings over the past few weeks to discuss how we present Manchester and the University’s strengths and feed these into deliberations about priorities for the Comprehensive Spending Review which will take place in the autumn. We need to make submissions by early September, so will be working on this throughout August. The messages about likely additional cuts are very worrying, so we are looking at how we would respond to major reductions in government funding.

I attended two 'farewell' events this week, which is unusual as I can rarely make these important events due to other commitments. I spoke at an event to mark the 'partial' retirement of Professor Karen Luker, who has been Head of the School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work for 15 years, and hence is our longest standing Head of School. Karen has led a hugely successful School - repeatedly recognised through successive national research assessments as the top School of Nursing in the UK.

I also attended the farewell event for Dr Melanie Taylor, Head of Safety Services, who has led our health and safety activities in the University for 17 years. David Barker, Director of Compliance and Risk, spoke about Melanie’s huge contribution to the University and surprised us all by explaining that Melanie has five degrees including ones from UMIST, the Victoria University of Manchester and The University of Manchester.

I was filmed visiting various venues on campus and meeting with some of our students as part of a video to welcome our new students who will arrive in September. The best part was chatting to some of our great students (two had just graduated) about their experiences and - I’m pleased to say - their huge enthusiasm and passion for the University!

Senior colleagues and I took part in a photo shoot with members of our LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) group to celebrate the forthcoming Manchester Pride which is held on the August Bank Holiday weekend.

We held a meeting of the 'Precision Medicine' group. We now know that there will be a 'branch' of the precision medicine catapult based in City Labs which are next to the University and Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and a related ‘Medicines Technology' Catapult based at Alderley Park. We are developing our own plans to build on and join up our strengths in precision medicine, biomarkers, e-health and early clinical trials - all of which are priorities for our Academic Health Science Systems as part of 'Devo Health'.

I also took part in several other meetings on health research to discuss the Catapults and our potential applications to the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) for biomedical research centre(s) and unit(s).

The research group I belong to met to discuss our application for funding for a clinical trial of a new intervention in stroke and brain bleeds. Such clinical trials are enormously complex with many regulatory and safety factors as well as logistics to consider, so there will be a lot of work to do to get the application into shape over the summer.

I won’t be sending messages over August unless there is something important to communicate. One of the key sets of information we will receive over this period will be the results of this year’s National Student Satisfaction (NSS) survey. Our own scores are critically important, but the national picture will indicate whether the increase in undergraduate fees has influenced students’ satisfaction, as the respondents will be the first cohort to have graduated having paid the higher fee level.

For many staff, the summer is a time of conferences, research work and planning for next year’s teaching and other activities. I also really hope that there will be time for you to take some holiday and a well-deserved rest. But many of our staff will be working very hard in August as A-level results come in and we deal with literally thousands of enquiries from potential students during 'confirmation and clearing'. During August I will be visiting some of the staff who work on our student admissions, but I will also be taking some time off - as I very much hope you will do.