Academic Restructure Consultation

The College’s academic restructure consultation closed last week, so here is what is going on!

As you will have heard by now, the College is going through a restructure process involving replacing the Faculty model with Schools – grouping Departments in a larger amount of smaller clusters essentially. This move has also meant that there is change occurring in various areas, including the administration that supports the academic work.

Consultation period

Over the past 45 days, a consultation period has been open to give feedback on the proposed changes – as well as administrative staff doing so, this has also involved various letters that students have written with regards to the restructure, as well as some of the comments that we have collated over this process.

These have included comments that you raised during the Open Meeting on 1 March that we organised with College – it was great to see many engaged students asking probing questions at this meeting and we continued to press on the questions that came up! We will be continuing to represent your academic interests on this matter, and this includes the organisation of an open meeting about the Doctoral School, scheduled for Tuesday 28 May – more details to follow!

What changes have been made as a result of student and staff feedback?

The College has posted an update on the intranet here and these are the key points to take away:

• A bespoke model for the School of Performing & Digital Arts – due to the location of this School, plans have been adjusted so that each location has an office to best support student enquiries.
• Placement support – recognising the particular work required for programmes with a year in business or industry, these admin roles will remain in the Schools that need them.
• PGT support – extra resource has been allocated to accommodate PGT students in Schools that have a large PGT population.
• Field trip support – extra focus will be placed in the School of Life Sciences & The Environment to aid the activity of field trips.
• Support for new programmes – due to certain programmes still being very new, extra administrative support will be applied to Electronic Engineering.

Back in the summer, we supported the restructure process in principle, since then we have been involved in ensuring that the restructure prioritises student needs – and we will continue to do this. As always, if you would like to discuss any of these circumstances in more depth then please do email me or one of the other officers, or come in and have a chat with us about these.

Jack O'Neill // Vice President Education