President's weekly update
11 May 2023
Industrial relations
UCU members are taking part in a marking and assessment boycott which will inevitably concern students in affected areas. We are doing all we can to protect the interests of students and mitigate the impact on them to ensure that they progress and graduate as they deserve. We have set up specialist groups to manage any impacts, but the boycott may create some delays for some students, which we will be working hard to minimise.
The dispute is no longer about the USS pension. This appears to be in a strong position and, subject to the formal evaluation, is likely to allow reversal of many of the changes that had to be made after the last valuation and enable a more advantageous scheme for colleagues.
The current dispute is about pay and working conditions. The pay award for 2023/24 (average 5.25%; 8% for the lowest paid) has now been implemented with a significant amount being brought forwards. This is on top of increments for about half our staff (~1.5% across the University) and the cost-of-living awards that we enabled for staff, equivalent to about 2%, which we believe is the most generous in the sector, costing almost £12m.
Pay negotiations are national and not in the hands of individual universities. At a recent meeting with UCEA, which negotiates on university pay across the sector, and over 50 vice-chancellors, it was very clear that there can be no further pay offer this year, due to severe financial pressures on significant parts of the sector. These will be greatly worsened by the increase in employers’ contributions (probably over 5%) for most post-92 universities whose staff are in the Teachers’ Pension scheme. If you have any questions, you can contact Deputy Director of People and OD, Andrew Mullen on andrew.s.mullen@manchester.ac.uk.
School of Arts, Languages and Cultures (SALC)
Students in SALC raised concerns about industrial action on top of the earlier impacts of Covid. The Students’ Union Officer for Humanities said that other issues most often raised were assessment and feedback, student voice, IT systems and module enrolment. We were able to give good news on module enrolment with a new system coming in very soon.
Staff talked about workload, student attendance, meeting our carbon targets, space, media communications and research contracts and payments – though these have improved. I was pleased to hear that the School is aligning its allocated research time for academic staff with the rest of the Faculty of Humanities. This emphasises our commitment to excellent and impactful research in the arts and humanities.
Celebrating our amazing volunteers
We held our annual ‘Volunteers of the Year’ event to recognise the incredible activities of our students and alumni. Yet again we saw some remarkable contributions and are proud to work with our Students’ Union and external partners on volunteering. Sadly, no staff were nominated this year – I hope this will change next year.
External relations
At our external relations strategy group, we heard independent analysis of how various stakeholders see the University. Overall, this was very positive. We feature amongst the top universities for recognition and esteem amongst a wide range of stakeholders, internal and external. Most scores were similar to last year but our score from our own staff (admittedly a very small sample size) is lower than we would want.
Regional
As always, great to meet Bev Craig, Leader of Manchester City Council and agree close alignment on our plans. We covered any issues including our Innovation District Manchester, Investment Zones, education, particularly post-16 education, and our ongoing partnership with Further Education Colleges, zero carbon and student accommodation.
Teaching
At a Q and A session with first year students about my lectures in biology, they asked some great questions. I also asked for feedback. They were very supportive of how I broke each lecture down into ~10 minute sections, which I was told last year that the course organiser, Dr Richard Prince does – good advice. They hoped that other lecturers would do the same!
Nancy Rothwell, President and Vice-Chancellor