Author: Ian Dunn, Chief Operating Officer
A wide-ranging agenda today, starting with a review of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) report tackling racial harassment in universities. We of course take the findings seriously and will respond through introducing a new reporting tool for staff and students, presently being soft tested, with reports being made available to a newly-formed working group. The working group will also be asked to formulate actions plans supporting the three major themes and ten recommendations from the report, which can be found here.
The Vice-Chancellor explained that our University had been invited to be a founding member of an International Universities Climate Change Consortium (IUC3), and that we have accepted the invitation. IUC3 looks to pull together 50 world-leading universities to provide a strong and internationally respected voice on matters relating to climate change science, impacts, mitigation and adaptation.
A discussion followed on the outcome of industrial action ballots reported on last week, concerning pensions and pay. A University statement released on SUSSED can be found here.
UEB then moved on to review and comment upon substantial 10-Year Plan (10YP) programmes; Student Experience and a University-wide Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Funding will be made available to support planning the delivery of both programmes, which are multi-year, major commitments and have significant change consequences and realisable benefits across many parts of our University.
Three further topics were then covered as updates: One Web, World Rankings and Stakeholder Engagement and Communications.
As OneWeb moves into Phase two there was really positive recognition of the outcomes so far and confidence in the journey ahead. Being a 10YP meeting, there was a theme of change and it was recognised that as OneWeb moves into the next, very active phase, the benefits of it will be felt right across the organisation, including that of developing in-house expertise in using Agile project delivery.
The World Ranking project has undertaken a superb analysis of our relative strengths and weaknesses and has identified areas for all parts of the University to work on, primarily to be communicated via the Deans and, with regard to engagement and communications, please keep aware of the forthcoming release of the Strategy Pulse and do access the Strategy SharePoint site here.