President's weekly update
3 September 2020
The last few weeks of confirmation and clearing for home/EU undergraduate students have been complicated, lengthy and for many, a great deal of work after the government change to the basis of A levels grades which happened after we had already filled our places. We have now made offers to every student who met the conditions of their offer, but we have had to defer a few in clinical subjects until 2021 for those accepted using their Centre Assessed Grades because we don’t have available placements this year for all of the extra students we have accepted.
As of today (3 September), we have just over 7,000 Home/EU students who have confirmed that they have accepted their place, this is 2% above our target (which included the additional 5% and the extra places we bid for). There are still some outstanding offers out, for example in clinical areas (medicine, dentistry and a few other subjects allied to medicine) because we only received confirmation that funding would be available for clinical training very late last week and those with offers of different courses have been given a little longer to confirm.
We do not yet know numbers that will register for postgraduate taught (PGT) courses or the number of international students. These are critical to our financial position because for home/EU students we break even. We will not have final numbers for PGT and international students until early November. The very last date on which these students can register and must pay is 31 October 2020. Obviously, we will be monitoring the position very carefully up to then because this is critical for our financial situation. Hence, we may have more students studying with us than usual, or significantly fewer.
Our future financial position remains uncertain. To mitigate the expected impact of a loss of income from students and other income streams, in May we instigated measures to make significant savings including halting all capital programmes that are not in contract, markedly reducing non-pay expenditure, furloughing all staff that were eligible and introducing a range of voluntary measures to save on pay.
We have had more than 800 applications for voluntary severance (VS) from Professional Services (PS) and academic staff. Numbers are still to be confirmed, but we expect that around 600 staff will leave the University. This may have a short-term impact for some areas of the University and I would ask that you are patient and supportive of your colleagues as they develop ways to ensure that we are able to continue to provide key University operations and services during this busy time.
From these VS and other voluntary measures, we expect to make savings of around £25m which will go some way to bridging the gap that is forecast through our loss of income from international student fees and other incomes streams. We have estimated that if we have a reduction of 50% in the number of international students, this will represent a loss of income of about £160m.
We are working on securing loans and awaiting details of the government support, which will largely (75%) be offered as loans. These will be helpful in the short term but we will need a detailed plan on repayment, not least because many of the savings we are currently making are delaying costs (e.g. deferring long-term maintenance and capital build is likely to incur greater costs later).
Our year-end financial position for 2019/20 is subject to checks and audit. It is likely to be slightly better than budget. While we have lost large sums of money on residences, catering, conferences etc and have spent significant amounts e.g. VS costs, extending postgraduate research students and post-doctoral researchers, providing IT equipment for students and staff, and contributing to the student hardship fund (in addition to many generous donors), we have also made major savings because most activities on campus have ceased.
We have always said that we will not know the complete financial situation for several months, and that is still the case. When students register with us we will be a step closer to understanding where we are in what has been a truly extraordinary year.
We are placing a very strong emphasis on ensuring we have robust safety measures in place to enable staff and students to return to campus. These include the requirement for 2 metre social distancing, face coverings, extra cleaning, hand sanitising etc. Indeed, we are making a significant investment in ensuring our campus is ready for our students and staff to return in as safe a way as possible, meeting all of the government guidance on social distancing and hygiene. Clear requirements will be set out in a student code of conduct covering both on and off campus, including sanctions for breach of the code.
You can find details of the arrangements for the safe return to campus on Staffnet. In all of these measures we are adhering to government advice. We are also in regular discussions with national and local health authorities.
We expect the official SAGE report imminently and advice from government which is likely to align with the advice from the Scottish Government. We are fully compliant with this.
Open staff meetings via Zoom with the Senior Leadership Team will be taking place on a monthly basis from September and will provide an opportunity to find out more about our financial situation and our plans for recovery and long term goals.
Nancy Rothwell, President and Vice-Chancellor