All entries for November 2019
November 11, 2019
Provost's Update for Academic Heads #21 (November 2019)
| General Election and Voter Registration |
| You’ll perhaps be aware that we do encourage students to register to vote at the point of enrolment, and many, though not all, take advantage of this opportunity. With the general election looming, we have a responsibility to ensure that all of our students have the opportunity to register to vote from their term time address (they can also be registered from their home address, as long as they only vote once). We understand that some Universities have encouraged staff to highlight the importance of voter registration and have set aside 5 minutes at the start of a lecture for students to do this. (see The Guardian article). We’ve been asked to do the same by both the SU and by UCU and so you may want to mention this to your colleagues. |
| Philanthropy |
| The Development Office is restructuring its operations to better position the university to secure philanthropic funds from alumni, foundations, and friends of the university in support of faculty research priorities and student support, in addition to Warwick’s capital plans. In the 2018-19 year, the team raised £7.2 million – the most it has ever raised in one year. This was led by a gift of £3 million from WBS alumnus, Clive Gillmore, to create the Gillmore Centre for Financial Technology at WBS. A gift of £750,000 was also secured from the Wolfson Foundation in support of the Interdisciplinary Biological Research Building to cap off a recent series of gifts from them. While these early figures are encouraging, the team is keen to stretch the university’s ambition, and is open to having exploratory conversations with faculty. Please do get in touch with matt.ferguson@warwick.ac.uk to hear how the team might be able to support your department. |
| Anti-casualisation and STP |
| This is the presentation that was used at ARC with HoDs last week to update on the work being done with respect to STP. You may find this helpful for use within your department. There will be more information provided about what is being planned and there will be further consultation on the detail or the proposed new arrangements. For now, perhaps the most important point to highlight is that this work is driven by our commitment to reduce casualisation by moving as many sessional teachers from what are called worker contracts and onto employment contracts. Employment contracts mean that sessional teachers are engaged on the same terms and conditions as other academic staff – they bring better terms and conditions but they will increase costs and they are less flexible but more secure. The move to employment contracts will initially focus on our own students (mostly PGRs) who teach and then further work will target other groups of sessional teachers. You’ll be aware that casualization is one of the concerns that is being voiced by UCU nationally in relation to the current industrial action and the work that the STP group has been doing is part of our commitment to address their concerns. |
| Environmental Sustainability and the Climate Emergency Declaration |
| Following on from the University’s decision to declare a climate emergency and commit to targets for 2030, we will be establishing a task force to co-ordinate the actions we need to take to meet our targets. There is a considerable amount of work on carbon reduction that is already happening as part of the broader masterplanning agenda and CCSG are progressing a range of initiatives to reduce our environmental impact (including below). The task force will play a key role in co-ordinating our current work and identifying further interventions that we need to make in order to reduce our environmental impact. One area that is of particular significance is space utilization and we will need to explore options for greater efficiency in the use of space so that we can manage planned growth without significant increases in our carbon footprint. |
| Too Good to Go |
| In line with our sustainability work and to reduce our food waste, we have introduced a new scheme called TooGoodToGo which boxes up food that hasn’t been used in the conference centres and sells it cheaply between 2-2.15pm. For more information, here’s the link: https://toogoodtogo.co.uk/en-gb. This will be actively promoted to students but you may also want to highlight to colleagues. |
| Study Leave – Progress Update |
| We now have agreement on the planned simplifications to study leave processes. Academic Staff Committee have now agreed the revised policy to accompany the recent changes to regulation and a revised policy will be circulated shortly. This will essentially delegate decision making on study leave applications to departments and will both reduce the routine checking required by HR and speed up decision making. This will hopefully make your future workload planning more straightforward. |
| Quarter 1 Accounts |
| Currently the finance team supporting academic departments is short staffed. New appointments are in the pipeline, but with the first quarter reporting in progress, they will be under some pressure and support for Q1 maybe much lighter touch than normal. |
Execblog Resource
11 Nov 2019 13:14
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