Soon we’ll be welcoming you back to Royal Holloway, ready for the 2018/19 academic year. I hope you’ve had a relaxing summer and have made the most of your break.

Throughout the summer, teams across the College have been working hard to develop our campus and upgrade systems to ensure your experience at Royal Holloway keeps improving - and there’s a lot to be excited about. We’ve opened the new Shilling Building, which offers new and modern learning environments and we’ve upgraded IT to improve your experience with Moodle (our virtual learning environment). Also, the Students’ Union’s refurbishment of Medicine is complete and you’ll now have a more accessible and flexible student activities space.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to share with you details of some other proposed changes.  Across the academic community we are discussing a proposal to create a new academic structure for the College. The proposed new structure would remove traditional faculties and replace them with seven to ten schools.  Departments would remain, and would sit under the umbrella of a school. Replacing faculties with schools maintains the strengths of departments and your academic relationships as we recognise how important these are to you.  In addition, it would enable administration hubs, which would be able to provide you with greater administrative support. In developing this proposal we have tried to protect what you tell us you value; your department identity, while addressing some areas that we believe would be even better if organised in a different way.

At Royal Holloway, we aim to stand out for the way we support you to succeed in your goals. We believe these proposed changes will benefit you and our academic colleagues, making it easier for you to access the support you need and better for our academics by releasing them from some administration tasks so that they have more time for you.

The consultation with College staff runs from 12 September to 12 October. To find out more about the proposal, please visit the student intranet.

I look forward to welcoming you back.

Professor Paul Layzell
Principal