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All-staff session on ‘unlocking’ our campuses – video available

17 June 2021

‘Unlocking’ our campuses and planning for the next academic year was the focus of the all-staff briefing on Wednesday 16 June.

The Co-chairs of the Major Recovery Team, Julian Park and Dominik Zaum, and the Ways of Working Pathway lead, Mark Fellowes, joined Vice-Chancellor Robert Van de Noort for this session.

Introducing the session, Vice-Chancellor Robert Van de Noort thanked colleagues for their work during the academic year. He said,  “I realise that it has been tough for many of us, but the anecdotal feedback that I have received from students over the last few days makes us feel proud of what we have done.”

Referring to the government’s decision to extend the restrictions until 19 July, Robert said that it felt right to come out of the pandemic and lockdown carefully – with the health and safety of everyone being prioritised. He said the Major Recovery Team – coordinating our University’s response to COVID-19 – had started thinking about how to ‘unlock’ our campuses and was planning for the next academic year.

Julian Park and Dominik gave the first presentation, which covered our plans for the summer and how we are preparing for the next academic year. They said that the campus ‘unlocking’ would be managed locally, informed by the needs of different Schools and Functions and bringing back colleagues and activities onto campus in a phased manner.

Mark Fellowes reflected on the work of the Ways of Working Pathway which brought together 50 colleagues from across our institution to generate and developing ideas on how we could work more flexibly. He outlined some of the ideas around supporting flexible way or work and what sort of changes we need to make. 

A video recording of the event can be accessed below: 

You can access the video directly on Microsoft Stream. 

Questions from the session have been shared with the Expectations and Workload Pathway project team and will be incorporated into the work of the project.

The next all-staff session is on Wednesday 16 June at 11:00 and will focus on what the forthcoming Government announcement on COVID-19 restrictions mean for our University’s plans for the coming months. All colleagues will be sent an Outlook Calendar invite ahead of the session. If you have any queries, please contact communications@reading.ac.uk. 

Videos of recent all-staff sessions 

Here are links to some of our other recent all-staff briefing sessions:

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