A message from the Vice Chancellor

Thursday, 02 October 2014

Colleagues

The start of the new academic year has been extremely busy. Certainly, there has been a great ‘buzz' on campus with an energetic Welcome Week and an Open Day last Saturday - one which attracted nearly 5,000 visitors. I would like to thank everyone across the University who contributed to the success of these important events in the University calendar.

Undoubtedly, this is going to be both an interesting and demanding 12 months. Whilst much that is good will continue to happen, I want to be frank, realistic and straightforward about some of the pressures we will face. I thought it useful therefore to lay out just some of the key issues for the period ahead.

Recruitment and Clearing

I was delighted that we accepted a very large number of new students with significant rises across most courses - as of Monday, there were 3,361 new full-time undergraduates and 1,757 for postgraduate fully enrolled, with more to come.

This is a tribute to colleagues' hard work across the University. But we cannot be complacent. The market for students has never been so competitive. The formal abolition of the undergraduate  student number control next year means we have to redouble our work to attract, recruit and retain our students in 2015 and beyond.

We launched first ever national recruitment campaign, Are You Ready? earlier this year. As ever, attracting prospective students is a job for the entire University as we turn initial interest into firm offers and students enrolling on their first day. 

League Tables

We are in the midst of league table ‘season'. In case you missed them, we rose from 213th to 203rd in the QS World University Rankings and two places to 33th in The Times and Sunday Times University League Table 2015. And today, we are ranked in the 201 to 225 band in Times Higher Education World University Rankings published today - a dip from 194th last year.

I hear occasional grumbles about league tables but, as I always say, they are a fact of life in the sector. We should never be afraid of benchmarking ourselves against the best. At the same time, we should be bullish about our achievements, reminding ourselves that we remain one of the leading research-intensive universities in the UK and, indeed, the world.

In addition, the National Student Survey (NSS) published last month showed almost 90% of students are satisfied with the University - 37th out of 156 institutions ranked. We saw above-the-sector-average satisfaction rates for teaching and academic support, as well as a big rises in the satisfaction rate for library resources. Moreover, RUSU was ranked seventh in the country - thanks to the hard work of students and the permanent staff.

This good set of results is positive progress but there is always more to do. This year's NSS cohort will be the first to have gone through their degrees under the new £9,000 fee regime. We will be launching a student engagement campaign over the autumn and a big NSS awareness campaign early in 2015. As we have seen previously, Schools and Departments play a crucial role in encouraging as many final year students as possible to complete the survey, and we will be looking for similar support again this year.

2026 Strategy

I set out our long-term vision and ambitions for the University last autumn. Over the last 12 months hundreds of colleagues have been involved a wide variety of projects to help us implement our strategy. This includes reviewing our portfolio of courses, planning for new disciplines such as Architecture and Spanish, enhancing careers support, planning for a UK-China college, rolling out our Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) programme, thinking about a refreshed research strategy and embarking on a University-wide efficiency and effectiveness project, to name but a few of our activities.

We will provide more details soon of all the work that is underway so that colleagues know what is happening and can be involved, as appropriate, in the process. There are regular opportunities to get involved in discussion and feedback groups on various aspects of the strategy. Keep an eye on the ‘Getting Involved' page for the latest sessions for you to attend.

Charter Reform

We want to strengthen and modernise the University's 88-year-old constitution - including introducing enhanced protection for academic freedom; enshrining equality for all staff; making it less adversarial and more straightforward to resolve disciplinary or grievance issues; and holding senior management more fully to account. The Charter has gone largely untouched since we became an independent institution in 1926.

We need make sure our governance is fit for purpose for the 21st century. We have completed an initial consultation on the proposed changes with the University and College Union (UCU). We will be formally consulting with UCU, the Staff Forum and all staff in the autumn. We will be setting out next steps shortly.

Capital Investment

As colleagues will know, we have an extensive investment programme in teaching and learning facilities. This term sees the completion of: 

• £148m, 5,000-room halls building programme - with the 650-room Bridges Hall opening its doors to its first students. We have also completed the refurbishment of Wessex Bar, creating the new Ice House.
• £4.8m library refurbishment - this is virtually completed with more work to come in the period ahead. And, of course, the library now has extended opening hours in term time.
• £1m wifi extension project - connecting every building on the Whiteknights and London Road campuses with fast broadband.

In addition, we have launched a series of ongoing capital projects - Whiteknights Sports Pavilion (due to be completed in March 2015); Bulmershe Sports Pavilion (February 2015); the refurbishment of Café Mondial in the RUSU building (March 2015); and refurbishment of catering facilities at St Patrick's Hall (autumn 2015).

The development of the Thames Valley Science Park is on track, with work on the key access route, the Eastern Relief Road, due to start in the new year. We are looking in detail at very exciting future projects, including the feasibility of a new Biosciences building and options for housing the new Architecture department from 2016. Again, I will keep you briefed on our plans as they develop.

Feedback and Assessment

The quality and timeliness of feedback and assessment has been a perennial concern in the NSS, where we lag behind the sector average. We should be doing better for our students in this respect.

From this term, we are introducing a firm 15-day turnaround limit on the vast majority of feedback and assessment. We have piloted this over the last 12 months and many colleagues have worked hard on putting new processes in place. This is a crucial pledge - a clear, robust minimum expectation for students, regardless of the course they are on.

Not surprisingly, RUSU has made clear it will hold the University's ‘feet to the fire' on this issue and I want us to rise to the challenge.

University of Reading Malaysia

The brand-new campus of the University of Reading Malaysia (UoRM) is due to open its doors for the first time in 12 months' time. Professor Tony Downes has now completed his move to be the UoRM's first full-time Provost and Chief Executive Officer, after a very successful stint as the University's Deputy Vice-Chancellor. Many colleagues are working hard to set up and market the new courses; build new academic partnerships with Malaysian institutions; and raise our profile across South East Asia.

New University Executive Board (UEB) and Leadership Development

A new University Executive Board has been in place from 1 August - including two new Pro-Vice-Chancellors: Enzo Raimo (from the University of Nottingham) and Robert Van de Noort (from the University of Exeter). These are excellent appointments and the experience they bring to the Board will be crucial to our future success.

We are also doing some broader thinking about diversity and inclusion. We know that we have more to do if we are to remain a thriving community.

The University is part of a Race Equality Charter Mark trial. In addition, we are now Stonewall Diversity Champions and have submitted our first entry for its Workplace Index. Both will help address long standing issues, including diversity at senior management level.

Gender equality is also a real priority for me. As of 1 August, we have an all-male Board. Despite us having an above-sector-average proportion of female professors, our annual Equality and Diversity Annual Report shows the scale of the task ahead to make sure that talented women get the support they need to reach the top.

This not just a Reading problem - it is a sector problem. But we must be more active than we have been to date. I have been pleased by the level of engagement in this discussion across the University and the suggestions that have been forthcoming, including updating working practices which stop women rising to senior roles and providing strong development programmes. Our history in having the UK's first-ever female Professor, Edith Morley, should inspire us to get this right once and for all. We need to ensure that conversations about gender balance involve both men and women, so that we are all engaged in achieving progress.

We will be seeking to renew our Athena Swan University Bronze Award to demonstrate our commitment to supporting women in science this year. We are supporting women's development through the Springboard and the Aurora leadership development programmes - alongside a new Women in Leadership network which had input from Chief Constable Sara Thornton at its first event. 

More broadly on equality and diversity, UEB will be looking at options over the autumn for a robust, coherent programme with tough targets. I will be discussing this with colleagues across the University and will want to set out our next steps as soon as I can.  

Ask the Board

It is really important that the University's Executive Board (UEB) harnesses the thinking and experience of colleagues at all levels across all aspects of our work. To that end, we will be holding a series of ‘Ask the Board' sessions in the next few weeks to discuss progress: 

• 21 October 2014 (1-2pm) L022 G01, London Road
• 22 October 2014 (10-11am) National Grid, Greenlands
• 23 October 2014 (1-2pm) G11, Henley Business School, Whiteknights
• 3 November 2014 (1-2pm) Madejski Theatre, Agriculture, Whiteknights

If you would like to submit your question in advance, please email communications@reading.ac.uk with the subject line ‘Question for Ask The Board'.

As I implied at the beginning of this message, and for all the ‘highs' that will follow, this year will not always be easy or straightforward. Some people, I know, find it hard to understand why we are showing a greater level of ambition, at the same time as we are saying we have to reduce our running costs as a University. My answer is simple. We will only be able to realise our academic ambitions if we have a secure annual operating budget which is delivering regular surpluses which can then be reinvested in the University. At the moment, that is not the case, as our ‘overhead' costs are too high.

Some of the decisions we face will have a direct impact on the number of staff who work here. That, in turn, will create uncertainty. I hope that we will be able to make swift but sensible progress to keep that uncertainty to minimum.

All that we do will require a substantial communications effort and, at times, it might feel like overload. I would rather be saying too much, than too little.  At the same time though, I am also interested to hear ideas about how we might improve the flows of information and ideas exchange.

In the end, the University is an academic community or it is nothing. So the changes that we are undertaking, whether or not you agree with all the detail, are motivated by a desire to allow us to concentrate even more - and hopefully spend more - on our key purposes of conducting outstanding research and offering great teaching and learning opportunities to our students.

I look forward to working with you closely in the months ahead.

Sir David Bell KCB

Vice-Chancellor