Date / November2012
This is the latest in a series of regular briefings containing University-wide updates.
Briefer
This briefing contains a summary of high-level, key messages to support you with your face-to-face communications with your direct reports.
Ideally, it should be communicated face-to-face to your direct reports by the end of the month – not circulated by email – and should provide an opportunity for your colleagues to give you feedback on the content.
It need not be presented verbatim. Please summarise where appropriate and deliver in a way you are most comfortable with to ensure that messages are authentic.
Briefing guidance / Please add your own content, which is relevant to your support division, college, school, or area of expertise.
The briefing should enable your direct reports to brief their own people on some of the issues facing the University.
Please encourage your direct line reports to add more localised information which should still be delivered face-to-face at each stage of the cascade.
Allow at least an hour for the sharing of information and feedback.
Highlights
this month / 1.Towards 2017: Securing our future
- 2. Transformation Status Updates
- 3. VC and Deputy VC events
5. New SUPLE student survey
6. University prepares for QAA Institutional Review
7. Intellectual Property Rights settlement
- 8.Turnitin eSubmission area
Our mission
Our vision
Our values / Salford is an enterprising University which transforms individuals and communities through excellent teaching, research, innovation and engagement.
The University of Salford will be, by 2017, an outstanding University renowned for the quality of its engagement, humanity, global reach and leadership in research, innovation and education.
We espouse and promote the following values and behaviours:
- The highest academic, professional and ethical standards
- Service to our stakeholders, clients and partners and, in particular, putting our students first
- Supporting our people and recognising and rewarding excellence and leadership
- Working together for the advancement of the University
- Innovation, creativity, enterprise, courage
- Diversity, humanity, fairness and respect
- Pride in our heritage and the distinctive difference we make to the world
- Investing passion in all that we do.
Our six goals and owners /
- Goal 1 – Transforming learning and teaching: Huw Morris
- Goal 2 – Transforming research and innovation: Jim Yip
- Goal 3 – Transforming engagement: Keith Barnes
- Goal 4 – Our people: Keith Watkinson
- Goal 5 – Transforming infrastructure and services: Adrian Graves
- Goal 6 – Internationalising our University: Brian Longhurst
Our four themes and leads /
- Built and Human Environment: Mike Kagioglou
- Energy: Nigel Mellors
- Health and Wellbeing: Eileen Fairhurst
- Media, Digital Technology and the Creative Economy: Brian Longhurst
Whywe need these briefings /
- The University acknowledges the need to keep its people informed. Our employees perform better when they are involved and when they have an open and honest dialogue with their leaders.
- Involvement creates good will and employees are prepared to go the “extra mile”. One of the targets for our People Goal 4 is to increase the number of staff engaged to at least 45 per cent by 2012 – placing us in the top quartile of UK organisations.
- This briefing will help support you in addressing the issues above and will supplement our US staff magazine, as well as US Online and the Staff Channel.
1.Towards 2017: Securing our future
The University Council met this month to agree a series of robust measures which will ensure our long term academic and financial sustainability and success.
This is one of the most challenging periods in our history. We are facing an unprecedented environment; an unstable economic situation, changing public policy on higher education, including fees, student number controls and visa pressures, as well as falling student demand in certain programmes and the need to improve continuously the student experience in a highly competitive environment.
This has forced us to address the major objectives of our Strategic Plan in an immediate and urgent time frame. Our Plan sets out a clear roadmap for the future with the realisation of our vision by 2017 and delivery of our six key strategic goals. We are determined to achieve our ambitions for the University by reshaping our overall offer in learning and teaching and research and innovation – whilst removing activities that are not sustainable.
You will be aware from my previous communication in September, that following the Strategic Planning Conference, I asked the Deputy Vice-Chancellor to chair a Task Group to develop a clear understanding of the University’s financial position and to make strategic and operational recommendations to assure our academic and financial sustainability. These recommendations were reported to the Executive on 5 November, before going before Council, where they were fully endorsed.
The Task Group has reviewed the key metrics for programme performance in the areas of student demand, quality of academic delivery, student experience and financial performance. It has consulted with colleagues in each of the four Colleges and with academic and Professional Services colleagues university-wide.
In January, you will hear more about our plans to review further our curriculum and portfolio with a view to ensuring that we are delivering a contemporary high quality curriculum, aligned to the needs of students and industry.
It is also important that we ensure the financial viability of our Schools and that we provide academic programmes that are financially sustainable in the longer term. We will also need to review the contribution made by research and enterprise activities and increase our income from these areas.
We will look to build relationships with the further education sector, driving enterprise income through building new businesses and robustly addressing poorly performing existing businesses. We will invest in our marketing to attract more students. We will realign Professional Services pay costs to sector norms and continue to reduce non pay costs.
Rigorous programme management will be adopted in order to achieve this. An Executive Planning Group has been established, chaired by the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, and will report regularly to the VC and to the Executive. The VC will then report progress to the University Council.
The VC is confident that these measures we will be taking will ensure that we have a solid future. The landscape is constantly changing and we need to adapt to deal with that in order to survive and succeed. Our University may look quite different but it will be better equipped to move forward.
The University of Salford will be seen as an institution that educates for capability through the delivery of applied and cost-effective programmes of the highest quality. We will build on our unique strengths in the creative industries, in science and technology, health and wellbeing, business and law; all underpinned by strong industry connections and clear values.
The tasks ahead of us will not be easy and there will be difficult decisions to make along the way which will require each and every one of us to play our part in putting the future health of the organisation at the heart of everything we do. Despite these demands and challenges we must not lose sight of our powerful heritage and our strong brand in the market place, nor of the people in our organisation who continue to contribute positively and creatively to our University, and those who study here now and those who will do so in the future.
University leaders will be working hard alongside colleagues to secure the long-term future of this great university, retain our uniqueness and strive for ongoing success and the VC will provide further updates as progress is made in achieving the changes needed.
- 2. Transformation Status Updates
Paul Cartwright, Head of Change Management, introduced the informal briefing by giving an overall picture of the Transformation projects and processes.
Scott Mulholland, Director of Student Information was able to provide updates on the SID projects, Jonathan Welsh, Administering Academic Progress (AAP) Project Officer talked about the AAP project and Mat Holden, e-learning Project Manager gave the latest updates on the Blackboard (Elevate) project including e-assessment and Collaborate.
There was also plenty of opportunity for those who attended to ask questions and to feedback on what’s working and what’s proving a challenge.
At the first briefing on 21 November,it was noted that many of the Model School processes are working well, but that there have been some teething problems. The Board have put in place contingency support and a Contingency Manager, Amy Berrisford, to help and also arranged these fortnightly meetings to update all colleagues on Phase 2 processes and get direct knowledge about what it’s like on the ground.
Most of the strands of the Generating Enquiries and Applications processes have been completed:
- The delivery plans for recruitment were completed in September.
- The centralisation of marketing budgets has been achieved.
- EMT Connect has been rebuilt and relaunched and training is being rolled out.
- Ascent 1: a more intuitive replacement to Apply Yourself is being rolled out. The Agent Management module is already live. The Assessor Module within it which routes applications to the right person for decision will be live by Christmas. This should help give a complete picture of how long it takes to complete applications.
- Managing Student Information – QlikView, a web based reporting tool, is now live.
- Academic module, which is a single repository for programme specifications is now live –snagging issues are being addressed.
- Maintaining Student Data – this has not yet been delivered. IT hope to have fixed the front-end of this within two weeks, the remaining components will be delivered by September 2013.
- Timetabling –an independent review is underway and will report by Christmas with lessons to be learned.
- Exam Scheduler, the method for booking in examinations for students,was due for publication by the end of November.
- There are 14 workstreams in the Administering Academic Progression project.
- Project governance has been strengthened with the recruitment of three School Operations Managers to the project board (one per College).
- There is a strong commitment and involvement from the Students’ Union and President.
- AAP is now also represented at CPIG meetings.
- Personal Mitigating Circumstances – we are implementing the new system in two phases. User acceptance testing, including involvement with a wide group of students has been completed. The project will therefore be delayed for two weeks. The workflow part of PMCs will be on stream by the end of January.
- Exam Board Reporter – this is a high risk project. A practitioners’ group has been set up along with a high level sponsor group in order to expedite the resolution of project issues. The project status is assessed as ‘amber’ meaning that delivery for May 2013 is still thought to be achievable.
- Optional module enrolment, Student support plans and results communications remain a priority for delivery in the next calendar year.
- The remaining workstreams are being reviewed to validate the original business case and assess the appropriateness of the proposed solutions.
- Blackboard 9.1 went live in September. A student audit of all 600 Semester 1 modules starts this week and assistance from the Digital Skills Team will be given to colleagues where modules receive poor feedback.
- All assessments must now be carried out by Blackboard or Turnitin (with some exceptions for physical submission).
- A request was put in for training for hourly-paid staff who work at MediaCityUK. This would be actioned.
- A Service Level Agreement (SLA) review in December would look at the gap in resources for website and marketing work within Schools and Colleges.
Wednesday 5 December 1pm-2pm Allerton A215
Wednesday 16 January 1pm-2pm Allerton A215
Wednesday 30 January 1pm-2pm Upper Maxwell Hall
Bulletins of key points from the Status Updates are being shared onlineat following each briefing.
- 3. VC and Deputy VC events
The first was on the subject ofTelling our Story and itsaw around 30 colleagues draw upon the University’s rich history and identity to discuss how we can best apply our distinctive qualities in learning and teaching and research and innovation to the work that we do now.The VC said that although universities are always moving forward, good universities also link back to their past.
The second session took place on 29 November and was entitled Putting Values First. It saw colleagues discuss a working paper the VC shared with the Executive during its strategic planning conference in September which proposes that we can understand our values in terms of service, innovation, respect and ethics.
The next VC Facing Forwards session will take place on Friday 1 February from 7.45am until 9am.
This month’s Deputy VC Breakfast Briefing attracted 65 colleagues from all areas of the University and heard Julie Berry speak about the Library and how it is changing itself in order to respond to the University’s own evolving needs.
Whilst acknowledging the continued importance of hard copy collections, Julie spoke about digital collections and video assets becoming increasingly important for the Library’s vision for the future.
4. New PVC and Dean for Health & Social Care
Professor Maggie Pearson has been appointed as Pro Vice-Chancellor, Dean for Health & Social Care, and Professor. She will join the University in the New Year.
Professor Pearson has over 20 years’ experience in the NHS at board level in both local and national organisations, as well as 20 years’ international experience in research, focusing on health services, inequalities, diversity and people’s management of their health.
She brings to Salford a highly impressive background in strategic leadership in higher education and government. Her wide experience in the NHS and in the Department of Health, where she led on Higher Education issues, will be an invaluable asset for our University.
Professor Pearson joins us from the Office of the Chief Scientific Officer, in the Department of Health, where she has worked as Academic Director since 2008.
Prior to joining the Department of Health she ran her own consultancy in health policy. She was Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Keele University for three years until 2007, during which time she led organisational change across the University, streamlining academic programmes to achieve efficiencies and developing an internationalisation strategy. She has also served as Deputy Director of Human Resources for the NHS and Head of Learning and Personal Development in the Department of Health.
Professor Pearson’s academic career was primarily at the University of Liverpool. After graduating from Cambridge University in geography, she qualified and practiced as a nurse before moving to Liverpool where she studied social aspects of leprosy control, the subject of her doctoral dissertation.
In her role as Pro Vice-Chancellor, Professor Pearson will contribute to leadership across the University as a whole. Details of her portfolio as PVC will be announced after she has joined us in the New Year.
5. New SUPLE student survey
The University is aiming to improve the way it gathers student views on their experience of studying at Salford.
Currently, the majority of final year undergraduate students are invited to take part in the National Student Survey (NSS), which is undertaken by Ipsos MORI on behalf of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and is carried out across the higher education sector between February and April each year.
To better inform teaching and learning, the University intends to supplement this annual external survey with a similar in-house managed survey for undergraduate students (on programmes at Level four, five and those at Level six but who are not in the NSS population) and Postgraduate taught students. This survey will be based on the same question format and performance indicators as the NSS Survey, with a couple of additional questions on modules taken, the Salford Advantage and a short section for international students. Students registered on single modules, for example in the College of Health & Social Care, will not be included in this survey, as their feedback is captured elsewhere.