President's weekly update

29 October 2021

Comprehensive Spending Review

The government published the Budget and Comprehensive Spending Review on 27 October. Despite the very difficult financial position the UK is in after COVID, and much concern over recent weeks about spending on research and innovation and teaching in universities, the announcements were very positive. There will be major uplifts in research and innovation spending from next year and continuing in future years, and funding set aside for Horizon Europe, hoping that future association is possible. The commitment to £22 billion of spend on research and innovation has been clearly restated. It will come a couple of years later but still reaching about £20 billion spend by 2024/5 an increase of 35% on the current year spend. Details on teaching expenditure including the response to the Augar report will follow later, as will the government’s white paper on ‘levelling up’.

Minister for Science

I met the recently appointed minister, George Freeman, to discuss his priorities. He has served previously as life sciences minister, so knows our sector well. He recognises the real strengths of UK research but wants to make funding speedier and more agile and focus more on innovation. We agreed that ‘patient capital’ (ie long term funding for companies as they start to scale up) is vital.

Discussions with German universities

With several other Russell Group vice-chancellors, I met the German heads of their leading 15 universities. Aside from exchanging views on each of our countries’ politics and potential funding, we considered a joint statement on environmental sustainability, due to be published shortly, and shared how we address concerns about research careers and research culture.

A busy time for internal discussions

We held an open meeting for staff on pay, USS pension and working conditions, which was attended by an independent pension expert, Paul Hamilton. After presentations, we took a number of great questions. You can watch a recording of the meeting and please do submit further questions to correspondence@manchester.ac.uk, if you have other queries we’ll do our upmost to answer them. New infographics that help to explain our approach are available on StaffNet.

Together with senior staff, we had a productive meeting with the Students’ Union Executive Officers. We discussed support for student wellbeing and mental health, areas where we have continued to invest heavily; the potential for industrial action and the threat this poses to our students’ learning and wider experience; equality, diversity and inclusion, sexual assault and harassment and the worrying recent cases of ‘spiking’ of students’ drinks. We agreed the need for a further joint activity on harassment and that we would join the Students’ Union in placing anti-spiking kits in all of our bars while publicising the risks.

At a meeting with leaders from across the University, Matt Atkin, Director of Planning, described the key components over the next five years to deliver our strategic plan, which has just been approved by our Board of Governors. In the general discussion, issues were raised about recent IT problems that have caused significant disruption to teaching and other activities and on staff workloads. We are very sorry about this disruption and recognise the effects they have had. IT staff have continued to work hard to get them resolved.

Staff wellbeing and workload are ongoing issues, which we also discussed at the Faculty Leadership Team in Biology, Medicine and Health and in the Annual Performance Review (APR) for the Faculty of Science and Engineering (FSE). We talked about how we can reduce workloads including some areas where individuals can take action themselves.  Examples included the number of course units we offer, any meetings that could be stopped or reduced, the extent of assessments, areas of approval that could be streamlined, and de-duplication and improved processes.  

At the APR for FSE we also recognised great achievements in spite of the major challenges of COVID, the aim to broaden business engagement and improve student satisfaction, but also that staff have been dealing with additional students and the move of many staff and students into MECD.

We are also making significant investment in our people, systems and processes via reshaping PS and we continue to invest in improving IT capabilities and infrastructure, such as developing capabilities in automation that will remove repetitive processes that slow our agility. There is still significant work still to do and we have over £15 million budgeted for improvements in infrastructure, cyber security and systems changes that will all make a difference. To contribute your suggestions to reducing workloads and making a difference, please email registrar@manchester.ac.uk. 

We have launched a new wellbeing service which is in addition to our in-house service, and colleagues can choose to access either.

And finally

I hope you may have seen some of the film and photos that formed part of the Corridor of Light exhibition on Oxford Road which was fabulous and we were delighted to be part of it.

Nancy Rothwell, President and Vice-Chancellor

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