President's weekly update
18 March 2020
The coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak is a major concern for all of us. The Government’s advice changed significantly earlier in the week, with people now being asked to move to working from home wherever possible and avoiding any non-essential travel and some social venues. As a result, we sent messages to all of our staff and students on Tuesday about very significant changes to our research, teaching and University operations. The situation is evolving, so I urge you to regularly check StaffNet where regular updates for staff are being published. We have teams working on all aspects of the impacts of coronavirus and reporting to myself and other senior colleagues. We will stay in regular contact with our staff and students during this period as I recognise that some may feel quite isolated. We are doing our best to answer your many detailed questions as quickly as possible.
As a result we now find ourselves in a completely new situation. However I feel it is important to continue to communicate to you through my weekly message as one of many channels, including video to update you on the work we are doing.
Coronavirus is of particular concern for our international students who wish to return home, but are struggling to do so. We also know that some students have recently missed significant teaching due to industrial action. We are urging all staff to make up as much lost teaching as possible and to deliver future teaching online wherever possible. We are working on adapting assessments.
Our Senate briefing meeting, which was due to discuss some of the themes in our new strategic plan, was devoted mainly to discussing the impact of coronavirus and how we mitigate, but this took place before the latest change in Government advice. Nonetheless, we received many helpful suggestions from Senate members, though of course the situation is now quite different. Senior colleagues and I also met with executive members of our local University and College Union (UCU), and will be meeting with Unison and Unite to discuss our actions in response to coronavirus.
Our Board of Governors’ meeting went ahead remotely - the main topic was the same as almost all of my meetings over the past week and looking at short, medium and longer term impacts of coronavirus on people and financially and how we best mitigate. We did review our progress in achieving our goals over the past year, agreed staff and student membership of some Board committees, reviewed my performance and agreed that the Board is satisfied with the independent Uniac (our independent auditors) report and management response to concerns expressed over space, equipment and value for money in MECD.
I attended the Greater Manchester Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) also by phone, and again this focussed on the impact of coronavirus on local businesses and the economy, though we did get the chance, albeit remotely to thank Mike Blackburn for his brilliant role as the LEP chair since its inception nine years ago when I joined.
Last week I spoke to Michelle Donelan, Minister for Universities, about the Augar report on post-18 education, and in particular, about stronger partnership between further education colleges and universities, and improving flexibility and mobility in post-18 education. I also spoke to Justine Greening, former Secretary of State for Education, about her work on social mobility. She was very interested to hear about our Manchester Access Programme, School Governors Programme, Global Graduates and The Works. She already knew about Stellify and was very impressed.
I want to thank all of you who have worked so hard to deal with this unprecedented situation and the rapid changes in our operations. I know that this has caused great stress and your hard work is greatly appreciated. Can I now urge that we do whatever we can to stay connected and together as a community, and most importantly stay safe and healthy.
Nancy Rothwell, President and Vice-Chancellor