Provost's Update #16 (March 2019)
| Interview Panels |
| This is as much a reminder as anything else and reflects a small (but I think important) change to the guidelines on the composition of interview panels. The specific guidance (available via HR web pages) is reproduced below. As you’ll be aware both women and BME staff are significantly under-represented in our senior grades. There isn’t a single “silver bullet” that will change this situation – rather there will be a range of structural and cultural changes that we need to make. One such change is ensuring that we have diverse appointment panels. Of course, many of you do this already but I thought it helpful just to remind everyone and also to note that to avoid outing undue burdens on the smaller number of female/BME staff at professorial level, we have also introduced some flexibility into the membership (allowing an Associate Prof/Reader to join the panel) and by widening the pool of eligible staff it should be a bit easier to enhance the diversity of panels. Membership of appointment panels. For all appointments “……..this will include considerations relating to equality and diversity. The panel chair will have the right to revise the constitution of the panel should he/she believes it does not fairly represent gender and ethnicity and/or…… For Professorial Appointments Departments can nominate individuals at Associate Professor/Reader level in order to form part of the Electoral Board, however no more than one member of the Board shall be a non-professor. |
| Reputation Management |
| This is the theme for this afternoon’s ARC with HoDs meeting. There will be two presentations; colleagues from SPA will provide background on the role that reputation plays in rankings and will highlight some ideas relating to options for more active reputation management. As you will see, this has a strong focus on research reputation Colleagues in Marketing will present some findings from reputation tracking work that we have been involved with and this looks at reputation from the perspective of a range of stakeholders. I hope these two sessions will spark a discussion about how we might think about managing institutional and department reputation in the future. |
| Update on capital projects |
Latest progress/developments include
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| Admissions and Recruitment |
| As has been the case throughout the cycle, the headline is that applications and offers at Warwick are up compared to the sector and to immediate competitors, although there is significant variation across disciplines. With UG applications, we are still just ahead of our competitors in terms of applications and offers, but we all seem to be behind the wider sector in terms of acceptances. There are two likely reasons - either applicants are taking longer to weigh up their options at our end of the sector; or we're all losing out to a growing competitor either just "above" or just "below" us. Since, broadly speaking, declines are also down it looks as though the first explanation is most likely. We are just about keeping up with last year's conversion rates for home (again supporting the notion that responses are simply taking longer), but we've fallen from 25% to 20% on overseas. For Postgraduate courses, the increase in acceptances is very positive but continues for now to reflect the increase in offers rather than increased conversion/response rates. We're continuing with the approaches introduced last cycle to encourage earlier responses but the dramatic change in responses for one department - which introduced a deposit this cycle - does point to the value in implementing deposits more broadly. The Marketing team are continuing to work with contacts in departments and there are opportunities to engage with Offer Holders through taster sessions, blogs, CRM and we are looking at implementing live chat software to encourage conversion. |
| ARC Data Sharing |
| You will recall that back in October we discussed the potential for sharing department level operational data (essentially the kind of metrics that we have been looking at in the planning round) with HoDs. This hasn’t been forgotten about – its just taken a bit longer than expected. But I hope that in the next 2-4 weeks we will have something to show you. |
| Augar Review |
| There continues to be lots of speculation around reductions to the unit of resource, options for restricting access to student loans and a range of other possible changes to the funding regime. A recommendation to reduce to the unit of resource seems almost inevitable, but there remains considerable uncertainty about reporting timescales – and likely government responses. |
Execblog Resource
13 Mar 2019 07:52
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