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President's weekly update

10 January 2019

The week just before Christmas was a busy one as the new Minister for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation, Chris Skidmore, visited us. He is a historian who has spent some time teaching at Bristol University. He wanted to learn more about our scientific research so as part of his visit we took him and his team on a tour of the recently opened Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre where he saw demonstrations of applications of graphene and heard about our doctoral training centre. He then visited Professor Barry Lennox’s lab in the Sackville Street building where he heard about our research on robots, particularly in hostile environments.

In a private meeting with the Minister I raised our concerns about Brexit and the potential outcomes of the Augar review of the funding of post-18 education.  We are concerned that these will both come together at a time when universities are not receiving the full costs of research, some universities are struggling with student recruitment, all of our costs are rising and there remain uncertainties over pensions. Many of these issues also came up at a lunch I then hosted for the Minister together with the Vice-Chancellors of Manchester Metropolitan and Salford universities and the Principal of the Royal Northern College of Music. However we did also tell him positive stories about our collaborations, for example on student mental health.

Similar topics were also discussed at a meeting early in the New Year of our Heads of academic areas, Professional Services and other University institutions. Matt Atkin, our Director of Planning, gave an update on Our Future – you can see all of the ideas and suggestions put forward by staff, students and stakeholders on the Our Future StaffNet site. You’ll see that ‘how we work together’ and the importance of our people feature prominently, and that ideas are on a spectrum from large, University-level ideas through to smaller scale ideas that could be enacted locally. Our draft vision and strategic themes will be discussed with the Board of Governors and shared later this Spring and there will be more opportunities for colleagues to get involved in developing the strategic plan that underpins the vision.

At this meeting I also summarised our overall performance as a University last year based on our key agreed measures of success. This was generally positive, however there were some areas of weakness, most notably a marked fall in our financial operating surplus due to increased costs of both pay and non-pay with only modest increases in income. You can find out more about our financial performance in 2017/18 in this overview of our financial performance. Steve Dauncey, our Director of Finance, highlighted the potential financial implications of the known and possible threats (noted above) and we discussed actions that we could (or might have to) take to mitigate against the impact of these.

I signed a letter to MPs along with other university leaders, warning of the very significant potential damage to universities if the UK leaves the EU on 29 March with no deal agreed. I also did a number of media interviews (The Financial Times, BBC Breakfast TV, Radio 4 Today programme, Sky, ITV and Channel 4 News) to explain the potential impacts on staff, students, research and financial sustainability of universities. I gave some specific examples of our research programmes that are heavily supported by European funds including graphene research and new developments in proton beam therapy for targeting treatment for cancer. Several of the interviews took place at our new cancer building (now named the Oglesby Cancer Research Building), opposite The Christie which is home to the flagship NHS proton beam facility. 

At another meeting with a group of staff in the second cohort of our Inspiring Leaders Programme we discussed agility and how we best manage changes that are likely to be needed due to external pressures. 

The Greater Manchester (GM) Local Enterprise Partnership ‘Foresight’ group met to discuss actions resulting from our most recent event on future mobility (ie new forms of transport) and the next topic that we will consider on clean growth.

GM Combined Authority has just launched a series of papers on ‘The Future of Greater Manchester’. They cover topics such as infrastructure, the spatial framework, housing, transport and clean air.

As this message goes out I will be on a very short visit to Boston with Professor Luke Georghiou, Deputy President and Deputy Vice-Chancellor, to meet senior staff from MIT and Harvard, which I will report on next week.

Nancy Rothwell, President and Vice-Chancellor

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