President's Weekly Update
7 September 2017
I hope that you have all managed to take a well-deserved break over the summer. I get very cross at suggestions that university staff have ‘a three month holiday’ as I know that this is a busy time for research, for master’s and PhD student teaching and supervision, preparing for the new academic year and attending important conferences and study visits.
You may also have noted significant press coverage over the past couple of weeks relating to concerns about student debt, the cost of degrees (our costs are almost exactly equivalent to the home fee), two-year degrees and the setting of senior staff pay – on the latter we already adhere to all the recent recommendations from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). It is a shame that there has been little comment on the value of universities in the UK, which, for example, in 2011-12 generated £73 billion for the economy, were responsible for 2.8% of GDP, created export earnings of £10.7 billion and over three quarters of a million jobs, in addition to bringing much further value to their regions and strengthening international trade and diplomatic relations.
This August was busier than usual for all staff involved in the recruitment and admissions of students for the 2017/18 academic year. The week of ‘confirmation and clearing’, when A level results come out, was fairly hectic (all the more so given the change to A levels), with literally thousands of calls and well over 100,000 visits to our recruitment website in just a few days. As a result of much hard work, recruitment is looking strong in spite of some earlier concerns and the decline in the number of 18-year-olds in the UK. It’s too early to be certain, but it looks like for both undergraduate and postgraduate taught students we will be slightly under our targets for home (i.e. UK/EU) students and slightly above target for international students.
In August the annual National Student Survey (NSS) reported. Our university was not in that public report because we did not achieve the overall 50% response rate needed to be included, not least due to the Students’ Union campaign to boycott the survey because of its use in the Teaching Excellence Framework, which will allow universities to charge higher fees. Overall the survey showed a slight decline in satisfaction across the UK, but it’s not clear if this was due to the use of a different methodology for the survey. I’ve read all of the NSS comments and some are very revealing. While this year’s survey results are difficult to interpret, we will still be using all data we have on our students’ satisfaction and the many thousands of detailed comments they submitted to NSS to inform the support and targeted measures we put in place to further improve the experience of our students.
It is also the time for reporting of various international league tables of university performance – including two of the three that we measure our performance against. We went down three places in the Shanghai Jiao Tong (ARWU) ranking and up one place in the THE global ranking. We went down slightly in the THE reputational survey but improved in other key performance measures, such as undergraduate student employability and PhD completion rates.
Over past weeks I’ve met with Lord David Goddard of Stockport; Afzal Khan, one of our local MPs and previously a member of our Board of Governors; Alex Tayler, General Secretary of our Students’ Union; Professor Graham Boulnois, Chair of the Medicines Discovery Catapult at Alderley Park; Rowena Burns, Executive Chair of Health Innovation Manchester, and a few others.
I spoke at a ‘World Merit’ event in Salford to about 150 young people from across the world who are working with this remarkable charity to achieve some of the United Nations’ sustainable goals. Several of our students and graduates were in the audience.
I visited our Staff Learning and Development team and met with staff to discuss the support for our next generation of University leaders and how we engage more widely with our staff.
I had a tour of the Alliance Manchester Business School new development, which is incredibly impressive and hard to recognise from the former Business School building. The project has been helped greatly by an award of £10 million which we won from HEFCE. The building will open later next year, and the new hotel, operated by Crowne Plaza, and our Executive Education suite will open in early 2018. You may also have seen the enormous cranes now on the site for our Manchester Engineering Campus Development which will enable us to co-locate almost all of our staff and students from Science and Engineering on the same site.
While writing this I am on a short visit to Hong Kong and Shenzhen in China to meet universities, collaborators and donors, which I will report on next week.
You will probably be aware that our voluntary severance scheme for Professional Support Staff in areas affected by staffing changes closed on Monday, 14 August. We have not received the number of applications we had hoped for in at least one area and, if confirmed, we will prepare the case for Staffing Committee to recommend to our Board of Governors the use of a compulsory redundancy process for a small number of roles in these specific areas of the PSS, which will be implemented only if we are unable to find redeployment opportunities for affected staff. The voluntary severance scheme for academic staff who are deemed to be ‘at risk’ closes at 12 noon on Monday, 11 September. If you have general questions about the schemes please see FAQs at:
or for specific enquiries email:
Nancy Rothwell, President and Vice-Chancellor
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