key changes to your university

Summer is here - hoorah!!

For this week anyway.

I wanted to take some time to let you know about some of the changes that have been going on this year within the University. Whilst this may not be of great interest to all of you, some really significant steps have been taken this year in reforming the organisational management and leadership of the University and I have been involved in these developments.


Old and new

We have a new Vice Chancellor who started his reign in September and started with great eagerness to review the way in which this University is structured.

As the weblink below states, the benefits of the new structure will include better planning across the whole University, better external representation and a greater ability to grasp opportunities and increase income.
(http://www.shef.ac.uk/vc/dev.html)

With these new structures has come a new leadership. Previously there has been 5 Pro-Vice Chancellors (like deputy heads) overseeing 5 specific portfolios. Underneath them sat the Deans of the 5 University Faculties (Social Science, Medicine, Engineering, Pure Science, Arts and Humanities).

The new structures will see the introduction of new 8 person Pro-Vice Chancellor team: 5 Faculty PVCs and 3 corporate, institution-wide PVCs (Teaching and Learning, External Affairs and Research and Innovation)

Check out who they are here:
http://www.shef.ac.uk/vc/newappointments


Why tell you this?

One of the significant things about the new structures is that they devolve significant new responsibilities to faculties, such as overseeing and dictating spending and setting of the budgets for departments within each faculty which had previously been done by the soon to be defunkt Academic Development Committee.

This new power will enable faculties to be shaped more according to the needs of that faculty. It also offers an exciting opportunity for us as a Students' Union to be actively involved in representation on all of the new faculty boards, promoting students' interests at every point and ensuring that the faculties are not selling us short on issues such as assessment or assessment feedback through to postgraduate support and placement schedules (for those departments for whom placements are a joyous thing).

We are still waiting to see how these new structures will bed down and how they'll work in practice, but it's certainly a great opportunity and one which is not to be missed or taken lightly.


For updates on University business check out:
http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/smg/