Dear colleagues
I hope it is useful ahead of today’s Open Session to provide a summary of the topics that will be covered. The main themes, all of which relate to how we continue to be successful while adjusting to the altered circumstances of the higher education sector, are:
Our 2025/2026 academic year budget
Our governing body, University Court, agreed at its meeting last week to allow us to operate again with a deficit of up to £6.5m for the next academic year - 2025/26. This is helpful in allowing us more time to respond to the reduced financial circumstances of the sector which have been caused by factors such as the restrictions on international student recruitment imposed by the previous UK Government and by more than a decade of real-terms decline in the funding of our Scottish undergraduate students.
Much work remains to be done to reach the £6.5m deficit in 2025/26 and Court will review our progress at the end of June. Review of School and Professional Services budgets for next year is ongoing to reduce the current projected gap of £5.5m that needs to be closed to hit the target deficit of £6.5m.
This gap equates to approximately 2% of our total revenue. This may, compared to problems elsewhere in the higher education sector, sound like a relatively small gap in our budget; nevertheless, we need to resolve a £5.5m problem for next year and then move to eliminate the remaining £6.5m deficit in the following two years.
We must therefore continue to make every effort in the coming months to work collectively across the University to generate extra revenue. We all have an important part to play in achieving this objective and we encourage collaboration across all Schools and disciplines to achieve revenue growth which could be via on-campus or online education, Transnational Education and commercialisation.
Student and staff numbers
In recent years, the level and pattern of student demand has changed significantly. A subset of our Schools and disciplines now have revenue and student numbers that are too low to sustain the current number of academic staff. These Schools and disciplines are being asked to develop a plan to address this imbalance through a combination of higher revenue and lower costs.
To support this process, we have opened Voluntary Severance (VS) and Enhanced Retirement (ER) schemes for academic staff in these areas:
- Business - excluding Business Management
- Geosciences - excluding Archaeology
- Language Literature Music and Visual Culture
- Natural and Computing Sciences - excluding Computing Science
- Social Sciences - excluding Politics & International Relations & Sociology
Heads of School briefed relevant staff earlier today. While VS and ER are primarily focused on certain Schools and disciplines, limited opportunities to access the schemes may be available in other academic areas and Professional Services. Individuals wishing to explore this should have a discussion with their line manager, Head of School or Professional Service Director.
Workloads and small degree programmes and courses
The workloads of our academic and Professional Services colleagues can be unnecessarily high where we are running degrees and courses that attract small numbers of students. Our staff are undoubtedly working incredibly hard to teach, assess, and support our students but are stretched across too many small courses and degree programmes.
We now need to continue to consolidate and enhance our education portfolio. Out of 1000 Postgraduate Taught courses, currently 25% have 5 or fewer students; and of our 1442 undergraduate courses,16% have five or fewer students.
It is important that we create a more financially and academically sustainable and efficient portfolio of degree programmes and courses that attract larger numbers of students.
Adapting our structures, processes and culture to respond effectively to new opportunities and changing expectations
The environment in which the University is operating continues to evolve. Drivers for change include extremely competitive market conditions, new and emerging technology, the maintenance of our ageing infrastructure, and our continued desire to support staff and students in an environment where we must grow new revenue and reduce costs.
Our operating model for Schools and Professional Services will need to evolve to help us address these challenges and stay on course to deliver our Aberdeen 2040 aspirations.
We have a huge amount of very high-quality work here, as evidenced by our consistently outstanding levels of student satisfaction, the strong growth in our research awards and our impressive UK league table rankings. The collective challenge we face is how to adapt and innovate while maintaining the highest quality activity in Schools and Professional Services. This afternoon's Open Session is an opportunity for you to contribute to this strategically crucial discussion.
Best wishes
George
George BoynePrincipal and Vice-Chancellor