2019 is Gulbenkian’s 50th birthday and all University staff are invited to a very special open day on Friday 18 January, from 11.00-14.00.

• Meet our team and see behind the scenes in our backstage tour (and be one of the first to sit in our brand new theatre seats)
• Find out what is coming up this year in theatre & cinema and the bOing! International Family Festival
• Learn about staff discounts
• Help us chose our new coffee supplier. Meet local suppliers and taste coffees – we want to know what you think!
• Unleash your own creativity and join a creative workshop
• Discover the brilliant Arts Council funded work we do with children and young people across Kent
• Find out how you can hire our spaces, volunteer, or become more involved with your arts centre here on campus

It’s very informal and you can drop in anytime between 11.00 and 14.00.

Please RSVP to boxoffice@kent.ac.uk so we have an idea of numbers.

Students can face many challenges while studying at University, particularly for those with a disability or ongoing condition that may impact on your learning.

One way in which support is provided is through Inclusive Learning Plans (ILPs), that can be implemented to support a student and help to make reasonable adjustments to assist with your learning.

Following a recent Disability History Month forum held by Kent Union Vice-President Welfare Omolade Adedapo with Kent Union Students with Disabilities Officer Lucy Doey, student trustee Lily Dedman and final year Student Philip Crooker, there were issues raised about how ILPs are working for students.

Kent Union wants to make sure Inclusive Learning Plans are meeting your expectations and providing you with the support you need to succeed here at Kent.

So let us know what works or what doesn’t work well, if you have had an ILP, or how you would like to see ILPs improved by taking two minutes to fill in Kent Union’s online feedback tool Digital Rep.

Post by Kent Union Vice-President Welfare Omolade Adedapo

In the latest episode of the Nostalgia podcast series, Dr Chris Deacy, Reader in Theology and Religious Studies in the Department of Religious Studies, speaks to Dan and Lavinia Cohn-Sherbok, who were based at Kent from 1975-97 before moving to Lampeter where Dan was Professor of Judaism.

In this week’s episode, they talk about being born by artificial insemination; being an unmusical child in a musical family; passing one’s driving test while singing hymns; addressing the negative perceptions that colleagues have of oneself by writing a novel about the experience; and whether nostalgia is good for us or not (here Dan and Lavinia take completely different positions).

The next Nostalgia interview will feature Cecilia Sayad from the School of Arts, followed in January by Olly Double – also from the School of Arts – who is a stand-up comedian as well as Reader in Drama.

You are now able to request annual leave and record sickness absence through Staff Connect; the University’s integrated HR and Payroll system.

This is part of the continuing development of Staff Connect which aims to streamline our HR processes and extend employee and manager self-service, providing a one-stop-shop for as many HR activities as possible.

With this new module, requests for annual leave will be automatically forwarded to line managers to authorise. If your line-manager does not usually authorise your annual leave, they can delegate this responsibility to another member of their team. User guides for both managers and staff regarding delegation set up and management are available on the Staff Connect Delegation page.

Staff Connect replaces existing local systems of recording leave and absence. If you have annual leave already booked or agreed for 2019, it will need to be re-entered into Staff Connect. This can be done retrospectively for staff who have taken leave in the first days of the New Year.

As well as booking annual leave, sickness absence also needs to be reported and recorded via Staff Connect which will automatically inform the Pay Office of your absences. This means paper-based or electronic sickness absence forms no longer need to be submitted to the Pay Office.  You will also be able to securely upload any doctors’ notes or medical certificates into the system which will reduce the amount of sensitive personal data that is currently recorded on paper and sent via internal mail.

Managers will also be able to record other absences for their team including compassionate leave, academic visits and trade union duties.

For colleagues in European centres, local arrangements will continue as usual.

If you have any questions about Staff Connect and the launch of this new module, there is further guidance and support available, including;

• Support sessions – available in January and February 2019
• Overview for managers of annual leave and absence management
• User guides for employees
• User guides for managers
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Who to contact for further support (pdf)

This is the latest update in the Staff Connect Phase 2 project. The new staff recruitment system, replacing i-Grasp, will go live in February.

From 2 January 2019 you will be able to request annual leave and record sickness absence through Staff Connect.  For managers, there will be a new calendar view showing staff leave and attendance.

This is part of the roll out of further enhancements to Staff Connect. The aim of this system is to streamline our HR processes and extend employee and manager self-service, providing a one-stop-shop for as many HR activities as possible.

The HR and Payroll software functions introduced in 2017 gave you online access to your payslips and HR e-records.  The second phase of Staff Connect in 2018 has seen the introduction of further functionality, and you can now book online for training provided by the corporate Learning & Organisational Development Team as well as record your appraisal (RPD).

With the roll out of this new module, requests for annual leave will be automatically forwarded to line managers to authorise. If your line-manager does not usually authorise your annual leave, they can delegate this responsibility to another member of their team. User guides for both managers and staff regarding delegation set up and management are available on the Staff Connect Delegation page.

As well as booking annual leave, sickness absence will be reported and recorded via Staff Connect. You will be able to securely upload any doctors’ notes or medical certificates into the system which will reduce the amount of sensitive personal data that is currently recorded on paper and sent via internal mail.

For colleagues in European centres, local arrangements will continue as usual.

If you have any questions about Staff Connect and the launch of this new module, there is guidance, including a frequently asked questions section, on the Staff Connect website. Thanks go to all staff who have taken part in user testing sessions and given feedback which has informed the FAQs.

To find out more about using Staff Connect request annual leave or record sickness absence, please come to one of the demo and drop-in sessions available for all staff and line managers. Please go to the HR webpages to find out more. Online user guides and videos will also be available before January.

This is the latest update in the Staff Connect Phase 2 project. The new staff recruitment system, replacing i-Grasp, will go live in late January. If you have any questions about the project, please contact staffconnect@kent.ac.uk

Admission to the University Carol Service is by free ticket only. The second and final distribution of tickets will be at 5.45pm in the Grimond Foyer on Tues 4 Dec. Please bring ID.

The event itself takes place in Canterbury Cathedral on the evening of Mon 10 Dec and will feature performances the University Chamber Choir and student Gospel Music singers. Much of it takes place in candle-light. There will be an appeal for Porchlight, a charity supporting homeless people in East Kent.

Wheelchair access and Sign Language (BSL) interpretation will be available at the event, reflecting the values of Disability History Month (but please notify us of any requirements).

Dr Tamara Rathcke, Senior Lecturer in Linguistics for the Department of English Language & Linguistics, is a member of a European team of researchers who have recently been awarded a research grant from the Belgian funding body FWO. In collaboration with Professor Anne Breitbarth (Ghent), Professor Claudia Crocco (Ghent) and Dr Jacopo Garzonio (Padova), Dr Rathcke will contribute to the a project entitled Prosodic cues to syntactic reanalysis: experimentally tracking Jespersen’s cycle in progress.

This four year project will employ a PhD student to study, under the team’s supervision, how prosody interacts with syntactic structure at different stages of an ongoing syntactic change. Innovatively, it will do so using experimental methods, studying the interaction of syntax and prosody.

Besides contributing a new dimension to the modelling of language change by looking at the interaction between syntax and prosody, this project will devise new methods for the experimental investigation of syntactic change, which may eventually be expanded to the study of other instances of ongoing change.

Congratulations to Dr Rathcke and her European team of collaborators on this achievement.

SSPSSR’s very own Dr Rob de Vries is giving a Q-Step ‘pubTALK’ on Monday 10 December at The Old Buttermarket, Canterbury, at 7pm for a 7.30pm start, followed by Christmas drinks.  Everyone is welcome!

Rob has recently published a new book, Critical Statistics: Seeing Beyond the Headlines and his talk, based on his findings, is called, ‘Lies, Fake News and Statistics’.

Browse your social media feed, turn on the TV, or open your news website of choice – chances are it won’t be long before you come across a story based on a statistic. Maybe it’s that ‘70% of married women have cheated on their partners’ (The Washington Post) or that ‘32,000 people in the US die from gun violence every year’ (tweet by US Senator Tammy Baldwin) or that ‘One in five British Muslims sympathise with Jihadis’ (The Sun).

The news is full of numbers for a good reason: numbers and statistics are vital to understanding what’s really going on in the world. But they can also be deceptive. In the wrong hands, they can easily end up giving us a distorted picture of reality. In this talk, Robert de Vries will show how understanding a few simple tricks and some basic statistical concepts can help us see the truth behind the numbers in the news.