Today (Thursday 13 August), the Vice-Chancellor Adam Tickell updated all staff, in his regular View from the VC email. You can read the full View from the VC below.
For thousands of young people across the country, the day has arrived.
With A-level results published this morning, the media understandably is focusing on the circumstances surrounding how grades were decided. This merits attention and I will say a few words in a moment.
But the immediate task at hand for around 80,000 young people, if estimates are to be believed, is to secure a university place through clearing today and in the coming days.
For Sussex, this means our biggest ever clearing operation. We have doubled the number of phone lines from 50 to 100 and I sincerely thank every colleague who has volunteered to be on the other end of the line. This is a new and confusing experience for our callers and I know they will be appreciating your advice and understanding. We also have brought back back our live web chat after a successful trial last year and are, for the first time, allowing students to apply online for a clearing place.
We won’t know for some days how successful we have been in attracting the number of UK students we need but, for the sheer level of industry alone, we can be proud of our efforts. The Admissions team’s work has been harder this year than normal: if we over-recruit students, we face major fines for doing so, whilst the last minute Government announcement that mock exams could be used as the basis of a successful appeal bring both unpredictability and unfairness into the system. The unpredictability is a problem universities will have to cope with, but the unfairness issue is one for students because the approach to mocks varies wildly: some schools and colleges don’t run them, others use them to motivate their students – marking generously – whilst others use them to frighten them into further work.
However, it is our responsibility to treat all our applicants fairly and to act in their best interests.
We have had to make many difficult decisions this week, to ensure that we strike the right balance between opening up opportunities and acting responsibly and realistically regarding student potential. Narrowly missing their grades is not necessarily the end of the road for all students. For many years now, we have practiced contextual admissions, which means we properly consider all relevant factors. For example, a student who has achieved certain grades and attended a school in a less affluent area may have just as much, or even more, potential as a student achieving higher grades from a private school. We can look at these details and see if we think they have a bearing on an applicant’s previous and likely future attainment. We also have a range of extremely popular foundation degrees, which give promising students an additional year to build a solid intellectual base.
While we can’t change how students have been assessed before they reach us – and no assessment system is perfect – we can put in place measures to ensure that talented students from all backgrounds are able to access a University of Sussex education. I am proud of Sussex’s record here.
Equally, there is no point in pretending that today does not have resonance for the sustainability of our University. Put simply, if we do not recruit enough students, then our income will drop. But the real test comes in a few weeks’ time, when international students make their final decisions about whether to come to Sussex, or indeed to travel to the UK at all. The situation with international students both has a bigger bearing on our finances and is more unpredictable – a combination which isn’t particularly comfortable. So, the hard work very much continues.
As you are aware, we have budgeted for a drop in our income this year and only the most optimistic would predict that we could escape without taking any hit. But the level of that reduction is hugely important. The emerging evidence at the national level, though, is very disturbing. In China, applications for visas to study in the UK are running at a small fraction of the number last year and the pandemic has meant that travel to the UK will be difficult and expensive.
In order to ease some of these concerns, we have confirmed this week that students living in a country with travel restrictions and who will be unable to join us in September, can register to begin their course online and can study in this way up to January 2021.
While we can hope for and work towards a positive intake in the autumn, we need to get into a position where, if the situation becomes more adverse, we have already thoroughly considered how we might respond.
With this in mind, Heads of Schools and Divisional Directors have started scenario-planning work across all budgetary units. In the best case, we will not need to use these ideas but, in the worst case, we will be thankful that we have planned before we find ourselves in a difficult situation.
There is no hiding from the fact that severe loss of income, coupled with recent trends in applications and recruitment at subject and University level, would create a real planning challenge, so it’s only right that we look now at how we would approach this.
Through astute financial planning and steady growth in student numbers, we have achieved a reliable surplus for many years. This has been particularly driven by high-growth schools and international student recruitment and has enabled us to cross subsidise and absorb losses in other areas of activity. This ability would be reduced in the adverse scenarios that we are aware we could find ourselves in.
I must stress that this is only scenario planning at this stage, as we don’t yet know what will be our financial position for the year ahead. Any responsible organisation would do this to ensure they are financially sustainable and fit for the future.
In every scenario we are looking at, though, we will need to continue to be careful with how we spend our money and we have already made considerable savings through our recruitment freeze and cutting back on non-essential expenditure. We are aware, however, that there are probably still pockets of spending that don’t make sense in the current climate and we would like your help to identify these. We will soon be sharing information about a series of online engagement workshops where you can share your views and ideas on how the University can save money. I really encourage you to take part if you can.
Finally, it is lovely to be able to finish on a positive note. Wendy Garnham in Psychology has just been awarded a National Teaching Fellowship by Advance HE. This is a real achievement for Wendy, who is Director of Student Experience for our foundation years, and reflects her real commitment to students and the way that she reimagines how university students learn and develop. Hers is a great personal achievement and source of pride for the University as a whole.
I am going to be food for midges in Scotland for the next fortnight, so will send you the next ‘View from the VC’ in early September. As ever, we will continue to inform you of news, events and developments across our communications channels.