Message from Hannah Rundle, Executive Director of Faculty Operations

26 Jul 2024

This week Hannah reflects on the importance of wellbeing for all our colleagues, looks ahead to the start of the new academic year and highlights some of the achievements of our professional services teams this year.

I write this message with sunshine coming through the window which feels highly unusual! My husband is a scientist at the Met Office so I am holding him personally responsible for what feels like weeks of grey weather… He tells me that is not how his role works, but I need to blame someone after months of cycling to work through winter. This is meant to be the bit of the year when cycling is a joy!

If I have bumped into you in the last year, I have probably already bored you about my e-bike. I have had rheumatoid arthritis since my teenage years, it is pretty well controlled but I do struggle at times with mobility. I was keen to find a low-impact way to build exercise into my life, and an electric bike seemed like a good idea after talking to a few colleagues. 18 months later I am still loving my commute, except when it is pouring with rain!

I thought I’d take the opportunity to share that you can hire a bike through the brilliant free e-cycle trial scheme we offer here at the University. This was really useful for me to try out cycling to work before I took the leap to purchase my e-bike through our Cycle to Work scheme. Whilst I am definitely mostly a fair-weather cyclist, ditching the car in favour of an e-bike for my 12-mile round trip to campus has been fantastic for my physical and mental health. It is one of the ways I try to manage my wellbeing and to look after myself.

I know that wellbeing is an important topic for us all, and thank you to everyone who took the opportunity to complete the recent Wellbeing survey and shared their views. The detailed results have been made available to all leadership teams across the University in the last couple of weeks, and we are working through our data in the Faculty. You can read an initial update on the results on StaffNet and we will be sharing more on this within the Faculty in the coming months.

This is also the point in the year where we start to wrap up the 2023/24 academic year, with final meetings, talks of summer holidays and thinking turning to the next academic year. A big area of focus for us at the moment is ensuring preparedness for the start of the 2024/25 year after the issues we had in 2023.

We are now in a much better position as a team and have a detailed action plan in place to ensure lessons are learnt from last year and contingency plans in place. Timetabling has been much smoother this year, and as a Faculty we are confident we will deliver good quality timetables. The start of year is always a challenging time in the academic calendar but we are actively talking about our concerns and working to mitigate them through University-wide coordination.

Timely escalation will be key if any issues come up, so please remember that if you experience any issues you can escalate them via our agreed escalation routes. If we don’t know about an issue we can’t fix it, so please do let us know if something isn’t working.

I continue to be incredibly proud and privileged to be part of the leadership team in the Faculty, and to take great joy in working with a team across the Faculty of talented, committed and engaged colleagues. This academic year has seen our professional services (PS) teams across the Faculty play a critical role in supporting our academic mission and our three core goals. There are too many brilliant successes to cover them all in this message but I did want to share just a few highlights from across our PS teams:

Our Faculty Student Marketing and Recruitment and Admissions teams continue to play a critical role in supporting our student intake. So far this year they have processed nearly 43,000 undergraduate and 70,000 postgraduate taught applications and they have also welcomed over 30,000 applicants to our recent open days!
Our PS Research team worked in partnership with academic colleagues on our 'step change' £4.7 million investment in AI and trust capability for Humanities.
We have seen fantastic support across our PS teams for our Bicentenary events, including Art of Research - bringing our research to life through street art - and in AMBS the recent Festival of Business, a three-day event for not-for-profits, sixth-formers and business leaders.
TLSE teams have provided ongoing project support and delivery of our Size and Shape project and have supported our Teaching Sustainability project.
The Geography Laboratories have been awarded Gold LEAF certification for sustainability and efficiency action. The University’s aim is for all its laboratories to achieve a LEAF award (minimum Bronze, with a target of 25% achieving Silver) and adopt the 6R ‘responsible plastics protocol’ by August 2025. This is a great achievement by the Humanities Technical team who are leading the way in this area.
Across the Faculty, PS teams have been extremely active in outreach. They have been working on campus with school groups who have visited our laboratories and workshops for sample practicals and tours of facilities. We have again hosted the Stock Market Challenge and some of our Technical staff have been out to schools to give talks on technical careers at the University, and we have had in the last couple of weeks a group of work experience students from our neighbour, Trinity High School, engaging with teams across the Faculty.
PS teams in AMBS and SEED played a major contribution in supporting hugely successful outcomes following full inspections by Ofsted of apprenticeship provision in AMBS and our PGCE programme in SEED. In SEED this was a great example of where the new Student Experience Programme (SEP) structure has worked well. The new structure ensured workloads have been shared appropriately and lines of responsibility have been clarified. This ensured that not only was the visit from inspectors a positive experience, but the day-to-day activity of the team supporting our cohort of PGCE students has worked really well this year. A great job by all.
In SALC, our University Centre for Academic English (UCAE) PS team have also supported a recent successful accreditation visit from BALEAP which supports the professional development of those involved in learning, teaching, scholarship and research in English for Academic Purposes.
The SoSS Justice Hub and Legal Advice Centre have had another successful year where we have been able to offer as a PS/academic team 166 student places with training. This has resulted in the School running 58 attended appointments supervised by volunteer lawyers, offering advice to the general public.
Across all our Schools our Information, Advice and Guidance (IAG) teams working out of our new Student Support Hubs have been busy developing many new event types supporting the student experience and attended by thousands of our students.

We did have some spells of sunshine for our graduation ceremonies and it was a pleasure to attend some of these over the last couple of weeks. Seeing the proud faces of our students and their parents and supporters (as well as some incredible shoes!) was a joy as well as an important reminder of the responsibility we hold to provide an outstanding student experience whilst they study with us, and to prepare them for life beyond the University.

2023/24 has been a busy year and not without its challenges, but it has also been a year of wonderful celebration as we commemorate our bicentenary. I’d like to finish with a huge thank you to everyone for all their contributions to the smooth running of the Faculty and wish you all a lovely summer. I hope you all get some time to rest and recharge. I’m very much looking forward to a week in Devon and Cornwall and hopefully some more sunshine!

Best wishes,

Hannah