MHS Teaching and Learning

There has not been a blog update for a while. This is because I became aware that edublogs, the company that hosts the blog, has been inserting advertisements into the text. Some of these inserts were not appropriate.  As a result, we decided to move the blog to the Faculty servers.  This has been done but there are a couple of problems that need to be sorted out.

Hopefully, this should be up again in about a week, at the most.

I am going to take the opportunity of doing a final summary of our activity on teaching and learning for this year.  It has been an incredible year for us and our Faculty has made great progress during this year.  Our greatest challenge has been to implement the implement the review of undergraduate learning and teaching and it was very pleasing that we got a special mention at the annual Operational Performance Review to quote Professor Gilbert from the feedback letter to the Faculty.

 ”The priority was to improve the undergraduate experience, which would need imaginative strategies to enable the University to offer high quality education. The Review Group praised the Faculty for the initiatives taken to date in implementing the Review of Undergraduate Education’.

So that was good news…

Over the past few weeks, the Learning and Teaching Committee and the Undergraduate review implementation group have been producing guidance and plans for a raft of initiatives, these are:

• E-learning strategic plan
• Academic advisers
• Plan to improve student satisfaction
• Implementation plan for review of learning and teaching

These are all available on the Faculty intranet or just by clicking on the individual bullet point.

Meeting with students

Over the past few weeks, I, Geoff Carter and representatives from the Learning and Teaching committee have been meeting with students from our Schools, as part of our Faculty review of the Schools.  This has been an incredibly useful experience and our discussions were very wide ranging. In general, the students were very supportive of the changes that we are making and we had great feedback from them, some of this highlighted very good issues and some was justifiably critical.  We are analysing this and I will circulate this in the New Year.  I would like to thank Chris Jenkinson and Ali Yazdi of University of Manchester Students Union for all his help in organising these meetings. They were fantastically useful to us all.

Blogging….

I am also really please that the Medical School has started a Blog. This is edited by Caroline Boggis and is already receiving many daily hits.  If anyone wants to have a  look at this, here is the link

http://www.medlea.manchester.ac.uk/Blogs/ShowBlogs.aspx.

It is great to see another School come on board with a blog. I am meeting with Prof Leon Aarons from Pharmacy in the New Year to give him a lesson in setting up a Blog. So Pharmacy will soon be joining Dentistry and Medicine.  The other Schools will follow shortly, I hope.

That’s about it for this year. I hope that everyone has a great holiday break……..

This has been a couple of weeks of meetings, most have been very important and I will update on the results of the relevant ones that I have attended.

We held a meeting of the Faculty undergraduate review implementation group and worked on implementing the review.  The most important matter was discussing the introduction of academic advisors and we are producing a document for the Schools to provide detailed guidance on what an academic advisor should do. We also asked the Schools to let us know any training needs that they had for advisors, so that we could look at the possibility of providing training sessions.  A major matter was the approval on the implementation plan, This was agreed and when it has been circulated to Heads of School, I shall post it on this blog.  We also discussed communication within Schools at length and decided to recommend to all the Schools that they should give considerable thought to the introduction of a School weekly update that is circulated to staff and students, the creation of a School Blog and podcast. All these methods have been shown to be great ways to disseminate School specific information to both staff and students.  These methods have been used extensively by the Dental School and Pharmacy are leading the way by working on a blog.

Faculty learning and teaching committee was the next meeting. This is concerned with the strategic and operational aspects of teaching across the Faculty. The major item of discussion was improving our National Student Survey results and all Schools has submitted an action plan for improvement. We are going to combine these up  into a single document and circulate this for action in all Schools. Again, I shall put this on the blog when it has been seen by the Heads of School.

I then attended a meeting of the University undergraduate review implementation group and we were brought up to date with developments across the University, there was discussion on the Manchester Medal for our best students and we need to develop a method for the Faculty on how we are going to identify our nominations for this award.  

I also attended a meeting of the steering group that will help prepare the bid for the Manchester Academic Health Science Centre.  My role is to provide input on the teaching aspect of the proposed Centre. We are working to a tight deadline and the initial phase of the bid will involve submission of information on our teaching performance and vision.  It is great to be involved in such an important bid and again this provides us with an opportunity to make real changes to our teaching.  One of the main themes of the Centres is to ensure that all health care professionals learn, practice and research together, and this fits with our overall undergraduate teaching strategy.

So while, some people are famously quoted as saying “meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything”. This has not been the case for me over the last 10 days, there are several important actions that have been agreed and I will circulate the results of these decision on the blog over the next couple of weeks,

It has been a while and probably too long between posts on the blog. My only excuse, if it can be put forward, is that I have been running round like an idiot trying to keep up with my jobs.  You may be wondering about the title of this post, it is based on lyrics from Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd from “The Wall” album.  This marked the decline of one of my favourite groups of the 1970s.  The song starts with

“Hello.
Is there anybody in there? 
Just nod if you can hear me.
Is there anyone home”?

For those old Floyd fans, who want to turn the clock back, here is a link to a live version

So why the “Comfortably numb” theme. I think that this is because the change that we want to achieve is going rather slowly and we are “probably in a phase of reflection and we have been incredibly busy with the start of the new academic year”.  I certainly hope that now our new students have settled in we can continue to make progress improving our undergraduate experience and we can stop being comfortable.  

As you may know the Faculty is taking part in a bid to become an Academic Health Science Centre and the Department of Health has just published some guidelines on the metrics that are likely to be used in the selection process.  One of these is the quality of the undergraduate education that we provide, as reflected in the National Student Survey results.  This is the first time that teaching has featured in any of the criteria for the establishment of a major centre and this certainly increases the importance of providing excellent teaching and learning in our Faculty.  So bearing this in mind, I have decided that we are going to carry out a review of the teaching and learning in our Schools.  This is an essential part of the implementation of the undergraduate review because we need to establish what we do already, what we need to do to improve and what we need to stop doing.  

This review will have these aims:

1     To identify the structures supporting the delivery of the curricula

2     To critically analyse the curriculum of each School

3     To identify the culture of the Schools with respect to undergraduate teaching and learning

We decided that each School will be reviewed by a small team of me and a member of staff of the teaching and learning support office with the following people being allocated to each School.

• Iain Mackie                 MMS
• Geraldine Main          Dentistry
• Christine Rogers        Pharmacy
• Paul O’Neill                Nursing
• Leon Aarons               SPS

You may remember that our last post was concerned with the build up to the annual operational performance review.  This is an important part of the strategic and operational performance of the Faculty and we are are reviewed on our annual performance by a team led by the President.  I am only going to provide an update on the review of teaching and learning.

The review was led by Professor Colin Stirling, VP for teaching and learning and evaluated all aspects of our work over the last year.  He started by commenting that we had a good strategic plan, importantly, we knew what we were trying to achieve and had a good plan to achieve these aims.  The major area of initial discussion was on the results of the national student survey and while there was copious praise for the dental school, I was asked what steps we were going to take to improve the performance across the faculty.  I and the other heads of schools described our plans which were essentially to improve communication in the Schools, introduce academic advisors as soon as possible and improve student feedback.  We also explained that each School had been asked to produce an action plan that was School specific (this will be the subject of a following post).

We then outlined our method of implementation of academic advisors with a target of all advisors being in place and meeting their students on a one-to-one basis by the start of the second semester this year.  This was then followed by a discussion on how we had set up our e-learning team and their method of working. Again, I will be providing a Faculty update on this in the next couple of weeks.  The review team were particularly impressed with the fact that we had set up an e-learning team in such a short time and they had delivered the roll out of Blackboard

The final part of the discussion was concerned with widening participation and the plans for integrating the Manchester Leadership Programme in all our programmes.  This, again was received very well.

At the end of the session the President summed up the overall performance and he stated that in terms of learning and teaching we were performing very well and he was particularly impressed with our effectiveness in implementing the recommendations of the review of teaching and learning. He was, however, concerned with the results of the national student survey and it was essential that the results were improved next year.  So overall our progress and performance was felt to be good. This is a reflection of the hard work that everyone is doing on the implementation and we have to keep the momentum going. This is the tricky bit, as it is fine to have a plan, the difficult thing is to carry it out!

Over the next few weeks, we will be preparing detailed action plans to improve student satisfaction and introduce academic advisors, I will be discussing these in future blogs.  

 Firstly I would like to welcome all our students back to the University, as this is the first blog since the start of term.  I hope that you all had a good holiday break. We are all trying to make great changes in the way that you are being taught and I hope that you can use this blog as a method of providing feedback to me and others who are responsible for the teaching that you receive.

We have now got to the time of year that the Operational Performance Review or OPR is carried out.  This is a yearly event when the President and members of the Senior Executive Team review the performance of each Faculty in a meeting with the Dean, Associate Deans, Head of Faculty Administration and Heads of Schools.  Each Faculty is asked to provide fairly extensive documentation on their activities from the last year and their performance is evaluated against the operational and strategic plans.  The meetings are fairly daunting as each person with responsibility is asked questions on their area.  We are then asked to produce an action plan to rectify any problems, in addition to being praised if our performance has been good.

This meeting is due to take place on Monday October 20^th. So how do I feel about it with a week  to go?  I have mixed feelings, I think that over the last year the teaching and learning activities in the Faculty have improved and many of the new management systems that we introduced last year have worked well.  We are also progressing well with the implementation of the Review of teaching and learning.  But…..we do have the problem from the results of the National Student Survey and I imagine that we will be questioned fairly extensively on this.  Nevertheless, we will soon have action plans in place to make the improvements that we clearly need to do and I am confident that this will lead to a better performance next year.  I will report on this in greater detail next week with an honest appraisal of how we did under questioning.

I would also like to draw your attention to the Dental School who are setting a very high standard for each School to follow.  They have now started a podcast, that is produced by Nick Grey and Richard Oliver.  If you want to listen to this, then follow this link. 

http://www.cyberears.com/index.php/Show/audio/5394

While a lot of the “discussion” is dentally focused this provides a great focus for the School and adds to the Collegial atmosphere that they generate. They have also featured on Radio Lancashire, which broadcasts to Lancashire only, so they have not yet made it to the world stage. I am going to be encouraging other Schools to do the same,  I also appreciate that this requires considerable effort but these efforts are paying off for the School. 

This is a fairly short Blog today, as I am busy preparing for the review, next weeks will be far longer.  We are also soon going to start on posts devoted to updating you on the core activities of the Faculty learning and teaching team and interviews with “Faculty figures”

Why the strange title for the blog?  I was out at a party and as my wife is a teacher, the party was full of teachers (this can be my worst nightmare….).  One of the teachers’ partners asked me if I taught and I said “No, I work for the University”…..Then I stopped, thought and realised what I had said.  I do not need a psychologist to tell me that this was a fairly deep subliminal thought that had surfaced. Yes….I do have thoughts occasionally!  But does this viewpoint reflect the majority of staff?  If anyone would like to make a comment, please do so and I will publish them on the Blog.  As I have said before, it is essential that we make changes to the way that we teach and relate to students and there are two components to this, one is the easily corrected structural way and the other is the more deeply seated cultural change that is much more difficult.

One indication of culture is the National Student Survey.  This is run every year by HEFCE and is designed to replace some aspects of Subject Review.  The final year students for every programme are asked to complete a questionnaire in late April or June.  Details of this are provided on the unistats  website. www.unistats.com  If you have a good look at this you will see that each School performance is broken down in detail and it gives a fairly accurate picture of how our students feel about us.

How did we do?

The results for the University and our Faculty were not good, with two exceptions, and there are important implications for this performance. The first is that these figures are fed into all the League tables and this will place us in low positions.  This is important because there is no doubt that students look at the tables and the Unistats website when they are making choices.  Also I do not want us to appear in the bottom part of any league table, we are supposed to be a world leading university and Faculty and yet we are not doing well.

I mentioned two exceptions in our Faculty and these were the Schools of Dentistry and Pharmacy.  When we look at these two Schools, Pharmacy have been consistent over the last few years but the Dental School was the worst rated Dental School in the country last year.  But they turned it round and now they are the most highly rated with an overall satisfaction rating of 97%,  So how did they do this. I have asked them to prepare a brief one  page report on the steps that they took and I have included it below.

National Student Satisfaction Survey Sept 08 School of Dentistry

The School of Dentistry was bottom of the league table for the NSS in September 2007. We were also performing poorly in the Unit Questionnaires.

Prof Mackie produced a Report in October 2007 on the possible reasons for our poor performances and an action plan was proposed.

The thrust of the action plan was to make the students realise how good we actually were. It was to make them realise all the good things and make them aware of these so that they over came the odd negative, poor thing. It was clear that the students tended to dwell on, and remember the negative aspects and problems, instead of remembering all the positive and good things.

So what did we do?

• Head of School, Dr Grey took hands on approach with high student visibility.

• Concentrated on being positive and pushing the good things.
• Improved communication. The students received the Head of School weekly update.
• Started a BLOG.
• We had an excellent student year rep with whom we worked. She knew that she could approach any of us and we would listen to her and help.
• Staff / student meeting. We made a point of listening to the students and acting on their concerns. There had been a tendency to “brush issues” aside in recent years.
• Let the students know how we had responded to their concerns and requests. Extra lectures, extra clinics. There was transparency.
• One member of staff/tutor met with a group of 10 – 12 students for an hour every week. This was the personalised contact between the group and the tutor. We tended to let the group set the agenda. If the group had nothing to fill the time we had prepared material to go through with them. That member of staff made sure that the session occupied the hour.
• The tutors met 3 times, with their students individually to go through their log book/ portfolios and give feedback, advise etc.
• The tutors made sure that the students realised that they were receiving feedback. We changed the heading on the sheets to read – feedback
• Each group of student had a rep that would speak on behalf of the group, for the group. These reps also met with the year coordinator.
• The tutors also met with the year coordinator to feedback issues. These were quickly addressed and actions reported back to the students.
• The year coordinator was supported by a full time administrator/secretary. They both had open door policies. The students appreciated this.
• The Head of School had 1 to 1 emails – he invited questions from the students, to which he responded personally.
• More staff student interactions/events.

Basically, we listened to the students, responded to requests and let them know what we had done or not done (in a few cases).                                         ICM/NG 23 09 08.

I have asked Nick Grey and Iain Mackie to provide a seminar to Heads of School and Undergraduate directors on how they did this and I hope that we can all learn from their experiences.

They put in an incredible amount of work into something that they felt was important and I would like to congratulate them on the change that they have achieved.  The staff and students all went out and had a picture taken last week to celebrate (dentists know how to have a wild time).  But seriously, how many schools could just put an email round and get 500 people to turn up for a photograph, this also shows how collegial the School has become.. Let’s see if they can do it next year!

 The best teaching dental school in the country

So what are we going to do now, in addition to implement the review of teaching and learning.  The first step is that I am going to be carrying out a review of all the Schools with respect to their undergraduate management structure, staffing and student opinions.  I have already met with our student reps and they are organising meetings with me so that we can discuss the issues that concern them.  I will hopefully be able to have reports completed by Christmas and these will inform me and everyone involved in learning and teaching on the way forward for our Faculty. 

We will improve……

Well the long hot summer is drawing to a close and some of us are back at the University.  This year my holiday was in Didsbury, South Manchester as we thought that it would be good to see England. Unfortunately, the weather put a dampener on that idea. So I went and bought and iPhone and have wasted hours and days messing about with it. I also built a garden gate, here is a picture of both items….

 So, back to work and here is an update on teaching and learning.  The most important event prior to the summer break was the extra meeting of Senate that was called to specifically discuss the strategy for personalised learning.  This document is readily available and is here……..

http://www.campus.manchester.ac.uk/tlso/reviewteachinglearning

Before I go on I should give a bit of background on what Senate is. Senate is one of the governing bodies of the University and is made up of elected and appointed members. It meets four times a year.

The Roman Senate

The University of Manchester Senate

This definition is taken from the University website

Senate is the principal academic body of the University of Manchester, and is responsible for the promotion of research, and for the regulation of the education and discipline of students of the University. Its main powers, designated by Statute, include:

• to formulate and keep under review, in consultation with Faculties, the academic strategy of the University
• to promote research, scholarship, learning and teaching
• to superintend and regulate the recruitment, selection, admission, education and assessment of the students of the University; to award degrees or other academic distinctions and to regulate the conduct, discipline and academic progress of the students
• to monitor and maintain academic standards, to monitor and enhance the quality of academic provision, and to approve new programmes of study
• to appoint the internal examiners of the University, and to recommend to the Board of Governors the appointment of the external examiners of the University
• to establish, modify or revise schemes for the academic structure and organisation of the University

The membership of Senate is…..

http://www.manchester.ac.uk/medialibrary/governance/senatemembership.pdf

In short it was necessary for Senate to approve the implementation of the Review of Undergraduate Teaching and Learning.  The meeting was interesting and the discussion was lively.  There were two main sides to this discussion, there were those who clearly saw that it was essential to improve the undergraduate experience and that one major component of this was the strengthening of personalized learning and academic advisors.  There were also those who agreed with the overall aim but they did not feel that it was necessary to have academic advisors and they argued that the present systems were adequate.  The eventual outcome was that the changes were approved by a majority of Senate and we can now get on with the implementation. Remember that this part of the review is concerned with increasing interaction with students and providing them with more than a confined education.  We must not be in the position of students feeling that “nobody knows my name”……

We then held a meeting of the Faculty implementation group and I managed to get landed with the job of writing a plan for the implementation of personalized learning.  The first stage has been to get information about what we currently do.  I have now done this and my feeling is that with respect to the academic advisor role we already do a lot as many of students complete portfolios and have discussions with tutors on an individual basis, particularly on clinical placements. However, my feeling is that much of this is reactive and we need to make the change to make input from academic staff more reactive.  We also need to ensure that all students have an advisor and meet with them regularly.  I have also obtained staff:student ratios for all schools and asked heads of Schools to let me have information on how many of their staff have minimal contact with students.  This information will then allow me to draw up a plan that will be further developed by the implementation group and circulated.

Another issue that is going to be very important is how we provide a wider education for our students.  To a degree, we are confined in what we teach because of our regulatory bodies, there is scope for us to widen the curriculum in terms of leadership, volunteering and university wide core courses.  In a previous post I mentioned discussions with the Manchester Leadership Programme (MLP) 

http://www.careers.manchester.ac.uk/mlp/

These were very fruitful and the result was that the Faculty Teaching and Learning Committee were keen that MLP became a core course in each of our programmes.  The Dental School and Pharmacy were ideally placed to start this straight away and we held discussions with MLP.  Following these discussions we decided that MLP will be a compulsory part of the third year in dentistry and the other Schools in the Faculty will make changes to their curricula so that they could facilitate this move over the next year.  I then attended a University implementation group and it was decided that increasing student involvement in MLP was the way to go across the University and a working group has been formed to do this. In the meantime, the Dental School will be considered to a pilot for this expansion.  So, our faculty had taken the initiative and the lead here. We will update you with progress.

I feel that we are now at the point of really getting going with the changes that are necessary to improve our undergraduate experience and times are getting exciting. We are also due to receive the results of the National Student Survey in the next few days.  I will update you on this and other developments when I get back from a conference in Croatia next week.

This weeks blog is concerned with e-learning and the changes that have recently occurred in response to the development and publication of the University e-learning strategy. 

But firstly I would like to congratulate two of our leaders in teaching.  It was great news to hear that  Caroline Boggis from the Medical School was made a Professor in the recent promotions round. Caroline is Associate Director for Curriculum and Student support in MMS and has held this post since 2004. In addition to maintaining her clinical research interests, which focus on image analysis in mammography and breast density, is also active in medical education research having obtained Subject Centre and JISC grants. She also practices as a clinical radiologist at the University Hospital of South Manchester.  She is a highly valued and active member of our team and thoroughly deserves her promotion.

 Professor Caroline Boggis

I would also like to congratulate Ioan Davies and his teams of Caroline Boggis,

Chris Harrison, Tim Cappelli and Hilary Dexter on obtaining a grant of £75K from JISC for the Crampon project. In short this project will develop software tools to support the design and maintenance of complex health care curricula.  This work will have a pan-faculty application and I wish them luck and look forward to its completion.

Now onto e-learning…..…..When I was first appointed I became aware that within our Faculty we had a great deal of expertise in e-learning. But, this was distributed throughout the different Schools and there was little collaboration between the Schools.  This became very clear when we held an away day for the e-learning staff.  We asked them to do a management exercise that identifies the culture of an organisation. This resulted in the statement that “Medical and Human Sciences e-learning was carried out by a hard working staff who were working like a disjointed cottage industry!  So, it became essential that we fixed this problem.

At the same time that we were making changes in the Faculty, Professor Colin Stirling was appointed Associate VP for e-learning and a University strategy was developed which interfaced well with our plans.  You can get a full version of the University strategy on

http://www.campus.manchester.ac.uk/elearning/uomelearning/strategy/

One of our first steps was to find a Faculty lead for e-learning strategy and we appointed Dr Julie Andrews from Pharmacy.

Julie is a Senior Teaching Fellow and is also the E-learning Coordinator for the School of Pharmacy. She has worked for several years in developing online formative and summative assessments for students and  in developing online automated feedback. She is currently the Chair of the Faculty eLearning Strategy group 

Julie formed a working group who developed our initial strategic plan that fed into the University plans.  This group became responsible for developing the proposal for a Faculty e-learning team.  Following the publication of the University strategy, we have slimmed down our e-learning strategic group and the following people are members of this important group.

Associate Dean (Teaching and Learning)          Prof Kevin O’Brien (by invitation)

Academic Lead E-learning (Chair)                    Dr Julie Andrews

Faculty eLearning Manager                               Ms Diane Bennett

Administrative Support (Secretary)                    tba

Representative of eLearning Staff                      Mr Steven Ellis (or alternate) 

Academic staff:                                                 Dr Nick Grey (Dentistry), Dr Philip Keeley (NMSW), 

                                                                          Dr Hilary Dexter (Medicine),Ms Nicola Turner (Pharmacy),

                                                                         Dr Richard Baker (SPS)

The main role of this group is to develop Faculty e-learning strategy with particular reference to identification of projects that can be developed that are applicable across all our Schools.

 At the same time as these developments we have formed a Faculty e-learning team, as have all Faculties and this is led by Dianne Bennett

Diane joined the University in 2004, having worked previously as Learning and Teaching Advisor in the Faculty of Medical Sciences computing team at Newcastle University.  For the last two years, she has been eLearning Manager in the School of Psychological Sciences, supporting staff in the use of the VLE to support a wide range of courses.  Diane’s background is in the support of health care education, with a broad range of experience including administrative management of examination and quality assurance systems, delivery of ICT teaching, and development of online resources to support the delivery and management of teaching and learning.

The e-learning team will have input to Faculty strategy and their main role will be to deliver plans and projects that we have prioritised. The final membership of the team is not finalised yet, but as soon as this is done I will devote a posting to introduce them all to you.

The first challenge that this team has is to roll out Blackboard, the Universities’ new Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). They have already started on this task and we should get this job done within the deadline of late September that has been set for all Faculties.

Diane and her team have provided this information for me to distribute on the Blog.

“Support in meeting the targets for September is available from the newly-formed Faculty eLearning team (elearning@manchester.ac.uk).  Teaching staff will need to be familiar with Blackboard in order to be able to upload content to their courses in Blackboard, and use the discussion and assessment features.  You are therefore encouraged to attend the Blackboard training courses:

http://www.campus.manchester.ac.uk/elearning/traindevelop/workshops/

Workshops will also be organised within the Faculty to support staff in creating their courses.  Staff wishing to attend these workshops will be expected to have attended at least the Kick-start Introduction course.

The Faculty eLearning team is working closely with teaching administration teams to ensure that the necessary work has been completed in Campus Solutions.  Initial creation of space in Blackboard, and inclusion of staff and students on the course, is managed via Campus Solutions.

The team has the following main priorities for September

•  To migrate to Blackboard courses which have previously had a presence in WebCT (and which are continuing in the next academic year).  The eLearning team will set up course spaces (sections) in Blackboard and migrate content (as agreed with the course leaders) – teaching staff will then need to review content and upload new content to Blackboard.
• To set up course spaces for any first year courses which have not already got a Blackboard presence.  These will be set up according to the standard course structure, which includes elements identified in the minimum specification.
• To provide support for other courses which require development in Blackboard in order to complete developments on-going from the current academic year.

Experience so far suggests that the majority of courses which existed previously in WebCT already meet most of the minimum specification.  Those new, mainly first year courses, which are being developed will work to the standard course structure which provides space for all these elements.  Blackboard itself has been generally well-received, and offers opportunity to develop a more interactive experience for the students.  The eLearning team is looking forward to working with staff in the Faculty to explore further use of eLearning and Blackboard throughout the forthcoming academic year.

The roll out of Blackboard is going to be a great challenge for us, but we are confident that this will successful with the help of the faculty e-learning team and staff in the Schools.  We will return to e learning later as the team gets established.

I am going on holiday soon so there may not be a post for a couple of weeks, though if I have time I will give an update on Senate who discussed the implementation of the undergraduate review. This was a lively meeting, but more of that later……time for a holiday.  This year I am going to Didsbury, South Manchester.