Dear Colleagues,
My thanks to all who attended today’s Open Session. I’m pleased and relieved to confirm that as a result of efforts across the University we’ll achieve the Court-approved budget target of a deficit of at most £12m in the current academic year; also, we are on track to achieve the target of a deficit of no more than £6m in academic year 24/25 because we have successfully reduced our projected spending by almost £20m. We are therefore on a firm financial footing to ensure the continuing success of the University and to support the quality of our education and research.
The impact of voluntary severance, early retirements, control of operational costs and the vacancy near-freeze means that, on the basis of current forecasts of revenue and expenditure, our financial recovery plan does not require savings through compulsory redundancies.
The circumstances that the higher education sector is operating in continue to be financially hostile: our SFC funding has fallen again, and UK government immigration policy is having a very serious negative impact on the ability of universities to recruit international students. Therefore, to mitigate these adverse movements in our revenue, we’ll need to maintain only very limited filling of vacancies.
Now that we’ve reset our cost base we should turn our full attention to mitigating workload pressures and freeing up time to pursue new revenue from Transnational Education (TNE), online education, commercialisation and fundraising. In terms of TNE, our Joint Institute in AI and Data Science with South China Normal University is now in its third year of operation and has 750 students across three degree programmes, with another 300 students due to start in September. The Joint Institute supports more than 20 full-time academic staff in our School of Natural and Computing Sciences and the Business School. Our online provision is expanding rapidly. There will be over 15 new programmes and over 25 new stand-alone short courses available online from September, and we are seeing growing numbers upgrading from short courses to full programmes this year. Our strategy to strengthen the commercialisation of our research is also bearing fruit, with a strong pipeline of over a dozen pre-spinouts spanning life sciences, medical devices, green energy and net-zero being nurtured. This year the University has received over £5m in philanthropic income, including major gifts that will support our research in neuroscience and our interdisciplinary fellows and PhD students, and a plan for a fundraising campaign will be considered by Court in June.
Both of our core academic activities under Aberdeen 2040, Research and Education, will need to evolve to meet the ongoing funding challenges facing universities. Sustained effort will be needed to continue our trajectory of growing research income, including applying for more large grants (according to disciplinary norms) that cover more of the full economic cost of research, increasing the proportion of our research outputs that are world leading, and ensuring more of our research has impact. In education, we will need to devote capacity to diversify our income through expansion of TNE, online and short courses, as well as continuing to refresh our programmes so that they remain attractive to Scottish, rest of UK and international students. That means ensuring that programmes are delivered and administered in an efficient as well as effective way, thereby addressing workload pressures on academic staff and on administrative staff who support the delivery of our education.
We will also become stronger through the reshaping of Professional Services. We need to address the gaps created by the departure of colleagues while ensuring that services support our key priorities for income growth, our students and our academic ambitions. The Chief Operating Officer, Tracey Slaven is sharing with you outline proposals for the reshaping of our Professional Services directorates. Key facets of that are an increased focus on academic commercialisation alongside support for Research, increased focus on Transnational Education, philanthropic fundraising and the bringing together of our student services from “registration to graduation”. We seek your feedback on these proposed adjustments to our structures. This will help us reflect and draw up a more detailed set of proposals which we will formally consult you on. Please send your feedback on the proposed plans to Tracey.
This has been a very challenging time for all of us. For five years we worked hard and successfully to grow our revenue substantially; then our financial circumstances went into reverse and we’ve had to work equally hard on the entirely unwelcome task of reducing our costs, partly through voluntary severance and early retirements. I share your sense of loss that close colleagues and friends have left the University, but acknowledge that these departures have bolstered our financial sustainability for next year and the years beyond.
Thank you for your professionalism, your dedication and all that you are doing to support our work and each other. I cannot overemphasise how much your many contributions to the university are valued.
Best wishes,
George
George Boyne
Principal & Vice-Chancellor