President's weekly update
3 October 2019
We held the first meeting of this academic year of our Board of Governors and welcomed Kwame Kwarteng, General Secretary of the Students’ Union. We now have two student members of the Board as a result of the review of our Statutes and Ordinances, but the other student member was unable to attend.
We held a briefing meeting for Board members before the main meeting. This included an update on academic governance by Professor Clive Agnew, Vice-President for Teaching, Learning and Students, and on pensions from Paul Hamilton, Partner and Head of Higher Education at Barnett Waddingham, which is an independent consultancy working across risk, pensions and investment. Neither Paul nor his company have been involved in advising any of those involved in the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), so he was able to give independent views. Paul gave an excellent overview of both defined benefit and defined contribution pensions, the key factors that drive valuations of the health of pension schemes and how actuarial valuations are done (he is an experienced actuary for other schemes). Paul has also given a similar presentation at a special meeting of Senate.
At the Board itself, in addition to usual reports and updates, we heard about the development of the latest stage of our Strategic Plan, received a report from the Division of Development and Alumni Relations and our Gift Oversight Group (which carries out due diligence on potential donors) and had updates on international partnerships and a review of our position on intellectual property policy.
On the same day we held meetings of a couple of Board sub-committees: Finance Committee and the North Campus Working Group, where we reported that the tender for a partner for Innovation District Manchester has now been launched.
At our Planning and Resources Committee we discussed our annual internal audit report; financial accounts and the final financial statements for 2018/19 (which will be published in December); student registrations for study this year; the latest version of our strategic plan; the results from the National Student Survey (NSS) of satisfaction and Postgraduate Research Experience Survey; our position in recent league tables and our risk register for a potential Brexit ‘no deal’ scenario.
I met Iain Foulkes, Scientific Director of Cancer Research UK (CRUK), to discuss progress with the new Paterson Building for cancer research, and the great successes of our cancer research, much of which is supported by CRUK.
Professors Graham Lord, Vice-President and Dean of the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health (FBMH), Luke Georghiou, Deputy President and Deputy Vice-Chancellor, and Clive Agnew, Vice-President for Teaching, Learning and Students, and I visited Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT). We first met with senior Trust staff to consider the experience of our students and especially the disappointing NSS results for medicine and dentistry. We also discussed our many productive research partnerships. We met students from a range of medical and health disciplines who were generally positive about their experiences but clearly were not keen on problem based learning. In a meeting with staff one topic of conversation was preparing students for more interdisciplinary ways of working and embedding digital and AI approaches in the curriculum, and how we better engage the NHS Trusts with parts of the University beyond FBMH.
Many of the areas that we discussed with MFT staff were about the student experience and this will be a key focus of our new Institute for Teaching and Learning (UMITL) which will be led by Professor Judith Williams and has a key remit to deliver on teaching excellence. It will also be the home for new cross-University academic development and recognition programmes, building on the success of the Leadership in Education Awards Programme.
The National Clinical Director for Mental Health, Professor Tim Kendall, visited the University. I met him briefly to discuss our research in mental health and the new dedicated student support service which has just opened.
I was filmed answering questions for our Foundation Day presentation and took part in a photo shoot to mark Black History Month which spans the whole of October.
Nancy Rothwell, President and Vice-Chancellor