Last year, the College made the decision to dissolve the three Faculties and to create six Schools, with each School containing around four academic departments. The move to a School structure is a big step towards us being in better shape to support you and your studies. A School structure enables us to maintain the strengths of your department, as we recognise how important these are to you. In addition, it will enable School Offices to build on the high standards established within departmental administration teams, while taking advantage of opportunities to achieve more consistency in service delivery.
Establishing School Offices means making changes to the current administration structures so, back in January this year, the College launched a formal consultation with academic administration staff on the changes proposed. The consultation period was an opportunity for everyone across the College to comment on the proposals, indicate support for the plans, or ask for changes to be considered.
The consultation has now ended and decisions have been made around the structure of the academic administration that will support Schools. As a result of the feedback, a number of changes to the approach first proposed have been made. These include additional resource to support student workers in Departments, more colleagues to support students and research in a number of Schools and an adjustment to the proposed School Office help desk opening times.
All colleagues whose roles will be directly affected by the decisions have been sent formal confirmation of what the change means for them and their roles and the options now available to them. We hope to confirm all appointments into the new structure by early May.
Overall, the consultation has been extremely constructive. Thank you to everyone who contributed comments during the consultation period, we will continue to share updates over the coming months and our next update will include details of the plans to move to School Offices. Please keep an eye on the intranet and the student newsletter for more details.