As you will be aware, the Government has launched a number of support packages in recent weeks to support organisations during the current coronavirus crisis including the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme. This Scheme allows employers to receive grants to cover the wages of their workforce who will remain on payroll but who are not temporarily able to work during the coronavirus outbreak, which is referred to as ‘furloughing’.

The University is not immune from the significant pressures resulting from this unprecedented situation and we are responding quickly to the changes in line with Government guidance.

As a University and your employer we are intent on protecting employment for all our staff during what we acknowledge is a very unsettling time for everyone. As such we are proposing to make use of the Government Scheme and to furlough those staff for whom there is no continuing work during this period.

We would like to reassure all staff that those invited to be furloughed will continue to receive 100% of their current pay. The Government have agreed to fund 80% of pay and the University is committed to topping up so that furloughed staff receive their normal expected pay and both the staff and the University will continue to pay normal pension contributions. Other terms and conditions of employment and continuity of service will not be affected during this period.

This means that some staff will be designated (with their agreement) as a “furloughed worker” in the coming weeks, which means they will not be provided with work. There are strict criteria for the furloughing of staff and directors will be working with HR over the next few days to consider those categories of staff where furloughing for a period may be appropriate. It is expected that those individuals identified for furloughing will contacted in week commencing 20 April.

We will continue to update you on the situation and more detailed information can be found in the FAQs. In addition you may wish to refer to the Government guidance for more details of the Scheme:

The Government’s Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme is initially set to run until the end of May 2020, but the Government has said that the Scheme will be extended if necessary. We are keeping the situation under review and will keep you updated as the coronavirus crisis unfolds in the coming weeks.

We appreciate that this is a difficult time for everyone as we continue to work together in very difficult circumstances. We are grateful for your continued commitment to the University and support for each other and wish you and your families well during this time.

Special Collections & Archives is looking to collect your experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

All of us are experiencing an exceptional time in our lives, where the COVID-19 coronavirus has had an impact on how we live, how we work, and how we interact with each other. Archives have an important role in recording these extraordinary times. In Special Collections & Archives we preserve the history of the University of Kent and the history of the regions and communities of which the University is a part, and we would like to create an archive collection that records the experiences of people in Kent in relation to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.

We would like to collect records of your experiences of – and responses to – the pandemic. Your record of your experience can be anything – including diaries or journals, artistic responses, poetry, short videos, and photographs. This can be in digital or physical form and we invite responses from all members of the community – whether you are juggling working at home with caring responsibilities, trying to carry on studying, volunteering in your community to shop or chat to others, or working on the front line as a keyworker.

Your contribution to the archive will be kept by Special Collections & Archives as a donated item and we will catalogue and preserve it alongside our other archive collections. It will also be made accessible to others in our reading room, contributing to research and engaging people with this important part of history.

If you would like to contribute something, then please start to make your record in whichever form you choose. We’ll provide more information about how to send your responses in at a later date. If you have any questions about this project, then please contact specialcollections@kent.ac.uk

For information about Templeman Library resources during this period please click here. If you’d like to know about how Special Collections & Archives can support your research digitally please click here. 

Wonkhe is the home of higher education policy, bringing the sector together through expert analysis.

A community of diverse voices, they provide platforms to drive the policy conversation forward and bring about real change.

Their podcast platform publishes The Wonkhe Show – which is a weekly roundup of everything going on in Higher Education. From University budgets and admissions to mental health during COVID-19, Wonke provides a great selection of podcasts for you to listen to.

To subscribe on your mobile device you can search for  Wonkhe’s podcasts on iTunes, google play or your favourite podcast app.

The University has now launched Kent Student WebChats which is a new and informal series of live online discussions via Zoom. The WebChats are designed to help students keep in touch with staff and other students.

Staff representatives at Kent can also use these sessions to communicate with students, whether they are still on campus, now at home or overseas.

Any student is welcome to join any WebChat session, however to appeal to certain communities, these are the four sessions using the following themes for this week:

Undergraduate Student Session – Thursday 16 April 13.00-14.00

Chinese Student Session – Friday 17 April 11.00-12.00

International Student Session – Friday 17 April 12.00-13.00

Postgraduate Student Session – Tuesday 21 April 14.00-15.00

With over 72 students signed up so far, they represent a broad cross-section of programmes of study.

Please feel free to encourage students to sign up to the WebChats relevant to them.

Research to be undertaken between the University of Kent and Queen’s University of Belfast is set to investigate a ‘common’ library founded in the 1420s at London’s Guildhall.

The £367,000 project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, will be led by Dr Ryan Perry, senior lecturer in the School of English and co-Director of the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and will be co-investigated Dr Stephen Kelly in the School of Arts, English and Languages, Queen’s University of Belfast.

The library was one of the charitable legacies from the estates of that famously wealthy and most storied London mayor, Richard ‘Dick’ Whittington (d. 1423). This chained library of religious manuscripts was built by Whittington’s innovative executor, the Guildhall clerk, John Carpenter, explicitly for the benefit of London’s citizens and for its poorer priests who could not afford their own books to aid them in their ministrations in the City.  The entire collection was sequestered by Edward Seymour, Lord Protector of England, in January 1549, to fill the shelves of his newly constructed library at Somerset house, and only two books from the library are now known to have survived.

The project aims to ‘reconstruct’ the collection through identifying clusters of Middle English texts that were being repeatedly copied by London scribes in an explosion of pastoral writing in the City that coincides with the foundation of Whittington’s library. It is the project team’s contention that this revolution in religio-literary culture was facilitated through the ‘common’ library.

The project, titled Whittington’s Gift: Reconstructing the Lost Common Library of London’s Guildhall, will produce an anthology of texts sourced from the library and a monograph length account of Middle English religious textual production in the City and beyond.

Simon Thompson, Professor of Logic and Computation retired from the School of Computing on Monday 6 April after more than 36 years at the University of Kent, having joined in 1983 .

Simon has had a distinguished academic career with his research mainly focusing on functional programming, most recently in designing tools to help people to write and test programs more effectively. In particular, together with Huiqing Li, Reuben Rowe and many others, he has been working on building refactoring tools for functional programs in Erlang, Haskell, and, most recently, OCaml, supported by EU and EPSRC funding.

He has also published many books on functional programming including Erlang Programming, Haskell: The Craft of Functional Programmimg and Type Theory and Functional Programming.

Professor Richard Jones said ‘Simon has made an enormous contribution to the School and the University. He was an inspirational Head of School for many years and transformed the School in often very difficult times. The continuing success of the Kent IT Consultancy is a tribute to him. He has also been a fabulous mentor to so many staff in the School.’

Simon said ‘it has been a pleasure to work with generations of students, researchers and academics at Kent, and I look forward to seeing the School of Computing flourish in the years to come’.

We wish Simon well for his retirement.