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The President and Vice-Chancellor

President's weekly update

20 January 2022

General Assembly

We held the first meeting of the newly constituted General Assembly (GA) with around 50 new members. GA is made up of many external stakeholders and some internally elected staff. It is normally chaired by our Chancellor, Lemn Sissay, who is in his final year, but in his absence, Pro-Chancellor Jim Hancock chaired.  You can find out more about nominating Lemn’s successor on StaffNet and further details on voting will be available in the coming weeks.

As usual, I gave an update on recent news about the University, achievements since our last meeting and our future plans, challenges and opportunities. I took questions on our innovation activities, widening participation, student satisfaction and wellbeing, and our research on health equity. John Cunningham, our interim Finance Director, reported on our accounts for last year and future plans. We also had presentations from Kate White, Director of Development and Alumni Relations, on our fundraising campaign for 2024 and from Neil Humphrey, Professor of Education, on the Beewell project that he is leading on. Neil and his team have now engaged tens of thousands of schoolchildren from across Greater Manchester who are part of an investigation into their wellbeing and likely impacts on this.

UCU ballot

UCU has re-balloted a number of universities that failed to meet the 50% threshold on disputes on either USS pension changes or pay and conditions. Our UCU members were re-balloted on USS pension, and achieved a turnout of 47.77%, which is below the threshold and slightly lower than last time.  UCU still has a mandate for industrial action over pay and working conditions from the previous ballot. 

Financial issues

We held our Finance and Capital Planning Sub-Committee, and our Board Finance Committee. In both we reviewed the latest financial accounts, our annual return to the Office for Students, and our annual TRAC (Transparent Approach to Costing) return. We also looked at plans to fund the building of new student residences, to replace older residences and meet student demand, and received an update on progress with Innovation District Manchester.

COVID

It seems that infection rates are now falling quickly, but remain high. Hospital admissions are also falling and we expect to see a change in restrictions announced next week. You may have seen that the Secretary of State for Education has said that he expects teaching to be in person, as the majority of ours is, though we need to reiterate the value of blended learning.

Internal meetings

At a meeting with officers of our Students’ Union we discussed mitigating circumstances for students who are unable to attend teaching or assessment in person for those on programmes, almost exclusively in Humanities, where online is an option. We also discussed potential future industrial action, and student wellbeing and harm reduction.

Senior colleagues and I met with leaders from across the University. Following a general update, we heard about short-term actions to improve People and OD, Finance and IT systems and received a briefing on the range of success measures and business intelligence systems that we will be reporting to the Board to assess our performance.

Our Strategic Planning Group also reviewed each of our performance indicators and how these can be benchmarked against comparable organisations, and discussed the details of the forthcoming Board Strategy day.

External meetings

I attended a video meeting with MPs Greg Clark and Chris Clarkson to discuss ‘levelling up’ and our many activities in innovation including Innovation District Manchester, Northern Gritstone investment fund and meeting the huge demand for skills in the region.

At a meeting of the Russell Group of Vice-Chancellors, we discussed the current situation with COVID (most are teaching largely in person), potential amendments to the Freedom of Speech Bill which would require extensive reporting on international income, the likelihood of association with Horizon Europe (which is still uncertain) and UCU ballots on industrial action.

Universities UK has launched a message to highlight the vital role that universities play in creativity. It includes a great film of our Chancellor and one of our students and is well worth a watch. 

Nancy Rothwell, President and Vice-Chancellor

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