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President's weekly update

26 May 2022

Annual Board Strategy Day

This is an important annual event at which SLT presents to the Board. This year our focus was on the external factors and uncertainties shaping our longer-term plans, and the key priorities for investment and their affordability especially against the increased costs everyone is facing.

Alistair Jarvis, outgoing CEO of UUK, spoke first about the main challenges facing the sector, all of which aligned with our own views. We reminded the Board of Governors of the challenges over recent years: Brexit, COVID, Ukraine, industrial action and inflation, but in fact despite all of this, we are in a strong position. The results of the REF were cause for celebration, student applications remain buoyant, we were again in the top 2% of universities in impact measured against the UN Sustainable Development Goals, we had an extremely positive external stakeholders review and in the current year we are in a good financial position.

The key concerns we described are staff wellbeing and workload, student experience, inflation (which is seriously influencing finances for the whole sector in future years) and improving our infrastructure and services. Much of our immediate investments will need to be spent on IT services, long-term maintenance and our carbon zero target. The Board asked us to congratulate the many staff who contributed to our success in REF. After the conference we had brilliant performances from our student musicians.

Northern Gritstone

There has been significant press interest and coverage of the first public close of Northern Gritstone. This is a joint venture between us and the universities of Sheffield and Leeds, which is chaired by Lord Jim O’Neill and aims to aise investment for spin-out and start-up companies. The first round funding announced was £215m with more investors showing strong interest.

Emeritus Professors

Our annual event was held in person for the first time in three years. Diana Hampson, who has now been Director of Estates and Facilities for 25 years, spoke about the exciting development of Innovation District Manchester. I talked about a number of recent successes despite the difficulties we have faced over the past few years. I described our Civic Universities agreement and work with Further Education Colleges, the success of Innovation Factory (our intellectual property and licensing subsidiary), opening of MECD, near completion of the Paterson Building and good progress on the Pankhurst Building as well as many notable staff awards and recognition.

Internal meetings

At our External Relations Strategy Group, we had a report from the World 100 Reputation Tracker on surveys of our staff, students, alumni, opinion leaders and the general public. The results, which we will summarise shortly, are very positive. Most measures showed improved scores with the exception of staff, which showed a small decline. We were the third most recognised university for our strengths by the general public who were surveyed - after Oxford and Cambridge, and the ‘net promoter’ scores dramatically improved for current students.

We also received a report on the excellent communications coverage of our REF results, with 115,000 social media impressions, emails opened by 70,000 alumni and 31,000 staff (some must have opened several times!)

In our meeting with officers of the Students’ Union we talked about how we can improve our partnership working even further and how we can help incoming Students’ Union Officers more quickly get to grips with the vast range of activities and committees they sit on.

External meetings

I took part in the final meeting of the Times Education Commission where we were joined by the Secretary of State for Education, Nadhim Zahawi. The final report of the Commission is due to be published on 16 June.

The Law Family Commission on Civil Society focusses on the charitable sector and in the meeting this week we had a report on the scale and diversity of the sector. We also discussed devolution, social inequality and environmental sustainability, which are all very important to us as an institution.

Staff Survey

Very regrettably we have discovered a technical set-up error by our survey provider in relation to this year’s Staff Survey, which meant that not all questions were available to all staff. Having looked at various ways around this, we have concluded that it is best to rerun the survey in September when everyone is able to answer each question. We are very sorry to all those who completed the survey, but it is so important to get feedback from across the University that we feel this is the best option.

Nancy Rothwell, President and Vice-Chancellor

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