Financial update: April's all-staff talk

In his latest update on work to deliver financial sustainability, the Vice Chancellor, Robert Van de Noort, spoke candidly about ongoing strategy implementation work and adapt financially in a highly competitive market.

Robert was joined by Professor Dominik Zaum, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Academic Planning and Resource), and Andrew Grice, Director of Finance, to answer questions from colleagues.

Progress against our strategic goals

Robert provided a reminder of the challenges facing the whole higher education sector, and also the many things we’ve been doing over recent years to address these, including rationalising our course portfolio with the Portfolio Review, reforming our Directorates including reviewing processes, continuing our journey toward carbon net zero, investing in growth subject areas and necessary supporting areas like our digital and physical estate.

All these activities have led to very positive developments against many of the KPIs in our University Strategy.

In particular, Robert set out a number of points about what the University will look like in 5 to 10 years, broadly in line with the current principles of our Strategy and supporting our commitment to academic excellence, and building on our investment in our digital and estates infrastructure.

We will be a larger university in terms of income, student and staff numbers, while structural changes will enhance both academic excellence and financial sustainability. We will also remain academically broad-based, with the shape and balance of our range of disciplines evolving in-line with market demand and as we invest in areas of excellence and growth.

Delivering a financially sustainable future

The University will, he explained, need to continue to evolve to meet this vision and will continue to invest where needed to achieve this. The University is on track to meet the target deficit for 2023/24 and Heads of Schools and Directorates, working with UEB, are working on plans to meet the targets for 2024/25.

The need to adapt to changing demands may give rise to targeted restructuring, which may lead to a small number of potential redundancies in some areas. We continue to work hard to ensure compulsory redundancies are avoided wherever possible and we are not looking at a University-wide redundancy programme.

Robert also explained the role of our investment fund. A bit like a savings account, the fund provides us with an invaluable opportunity to invest in a considered, strategic and long-term approach to addressing our operational deficit and achieving financial sustainability, rather than just offsetting structural or long-term shortfalls.

This puts us in a strong position compared to many other universities that have been forced into taking more drastic action to make immediate savings.

Supporting colleagues through fair and open engagement

While understanding that talk of redundancies may cause uncertainty and concern, Robert emphasised his commitment to transparency and acknowledged the need to share further information on timescales as soon as feasible to do so.

Wherever possible, planning to achieve savings and deliver growth will be made through our normal resource planning cycle, but some changes may be necessary outside this. Any restructuring will be conducted in line with our Restructuring Policy.

Our many wellbeing resources remain available to colleagues, but it is important to realise that our commitment to the wellbeing of our community is fundamentally about how we manage tough times and hard decisions.

The wellbeing of our community remains a priority. Ultimately, adapting to a changing environment and progressing towards our strategic goals, including financial sustainability, by taking decisions that might sometimes be difficult, preserves this in the long term and not just the short term. We seek to address this through openness and transparency, clear and fair policies to manage change and restructuring, and by ongoing investment in our future.

Further information

The Q&A session touched on a wide range of issues, on which you can find more information:

• ·our approach to achieving financial sustainability and reducing our deficit on the financial information webpages.
• ·our plans for student recruitment growth (all-staff briefing, February 2024)
• global engagement and internationalisation (all-staff talk, January 2024)
• the new Directorates structure being brought in for 2024/25 (all-staff talk, July 2023, from 8 minutes, and the FAQs page).

All previous talks can be viewed on our UoR All Staff playlist.