From Simone Davies | Director of MORA

As many of you will know, Clearing is the time of year when we fill any remaining places on our courses. We receive phone calls from potential students who have not yet secured a place at University, meaning that during Clearing our hotline is especially busy.

This year, we require support from members of the University to ensure the success of our Clearing campaigns. We are therefore inviting volunteers to work in our Applications Support Team. You can work from home or from the campus, and training will be provided. The shifts for the Applications teams are:

Thursday 18 August: 07:45–15:45 or 09:00-17:00

Friday 19 August: 09:00-17:00

If you would like to get involved, please speak with your line manager and email Ami Solomon a.solomon@kent.ac.uk

Thank you in advance for your help in supporting future students on their journey to Kent – we can’t do this without you.

Memorial at Canterbury Cathedral for Dr James Appleyard, 23 June at 14:00.

Dr James Appleyard was awarded an honorary degree by the University in July 1999. Throughout his career as a consultant paediatrician and child health campaigner he was a strong supporter of the University and most recently the new Kent and Medway Medical School. He was also Treasurer of the British Medical Association and President of the World Medical Association.

As a highly respect local doctor and campaigner across the county, his family would welcome being joined at the memorial by University staff who had the opportunity to work with and get to know him.

The memorial for Dr James Appleyard will be held in the Quire of Canterbury Cathedral on Thursday, 23 June at 14:00.

Obituaries:

• The Times
• Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health
• Kent Online

We have continued to listen to feedback, engage with colleagues, and design system improvements to ensure that KentVision improves a variety of processes as its implementation continues.

We have confirmed the immediate and future SITS features and functionality required with diverse stakeholder groups. The KentVision Delivery team has continued delivering the agreed enhancements, features, and functionality to meet the short-term academic calendar timelines.

Functional Area Working Groups

To ensure colleagues views and recommendations are fully considered, the KentVision Board established six Functional Area Working Groups to enable and track feedback from a variety of teams across the University. This has enabled the team to best prioritise future improvements to the system.

Functional Group members represent a mixture of colleagues from Divisions, professional services and central teams and are split across the following operational areas:

• Statutory and Core student record
• Admissions, Clearing and Recruitment
• Assessment
• Finance
• PGR
• Student Activity and Experience

The work of the Functional Groups, with the support of an independent SITS consultant, has enabled us to fully assess and prioritise the requirements of future improvements to help move forward key areas of work, reprioritising our plan where required in response to our changing circumstances. We will be updating colleagues on this delivery schedule for 2022 during June.

Our technology teams have been very busy in the background working to enhance various pieces of functionality, via a series of technology improvements, throughout the last year and we would like to share an update on our most recent deployment:

Assessments – Board of Examiners Meetings

The KV delivery team have worked hard with colleagues to gather as much feedback as possible to improve the Board of Examiners Meetings functionality – we have taken this feedback and held extensive discussions with staff through a series of workshops facilitated by our business analysts and developers.

The improvements that were recently deployed to live functionality have been widely praised by staff – with positive feedback received from our Show and Tell sessions. The improvements will help enhance processes – and deliver a better experience for our staff and our students. This year, we will gather live feedback during Boards so we can make fixes and enhance the functionality to prepare for future improvements in this area.

• Significant development across all aspects of the board process following detailed user feedback. Functionality deployed to the live environment with a read-only version of board to be released.
• Reconfigured board screens to ensure faster processing times for Divisions – enabling a smoother user experience.
• A detailed results letter review was conducted with divisions and central teams; new templates created for agreed progression outcomes.
• Significant changes to post-board processing functionality for central teams enabling a defined process and wider use by team members.
• New end-to-end process in KentVision from mitigation committee through to internal, main, and post-board changes. All note recordings (module actions and outcome recommendations) are now recorded within the system.

These improvements are the culmination of months of hard work behind the scenes, and we commend everyone involved for their work -especially the users of the system dedicating time to ensure improvements are realised.

Next Steps?

• Technology and process improvements are to continue with deployments scheduled through June and July.
• A staged approach and timeline for delivery during 2022, of the far-ranging and numerous improvements, will be shared in June.
• Detailed business readiness activities, including transition plans and training and communication.
• Continuous updates on how our improvements, plans and communications are informed by feedback from our students and staff.

From Professor Georgina Randsley de Moura | Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Chair of the Lambeth Steering Group

This summer the University will host the Lambeth Conference from 26 July to 8 August. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, will convene senior figures from across the worldwide Anglican Communion to join for prayer, reflection, fellowship and dialogue.  

The Conference will have international prominence and is expected to attract widespread interest, with our Canterbury campus providing the platform for the Lambeth Conference’s wide-ranging programme of discussion and spiritual reflection on many of the key questions facing society including climate change, sustainable development, international collaboration, poverty, gender justice, and much more.

As a community of learning, our University is a place of debate and discussion. Sometimes that debate is lively, sometimes contentious, and sometimes challenging. Wherever possible we use our position of influence, the insights of our researchers, and the work of our students and staff to bring about progress and positive change.

In this spirit, we warmly welcome the gathering of voices from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and outlooks to the Lambeth Conference and, as a University, we intend to learn from and, where appropriate, add our voice to the discussion of the vital questions under discussion.

Alongside this we are clear that the position of the worldwide Anglican Communion on the place of LGBT+ people within the Church and wider society does not fit with our deeply held values of equality, inclusion, tolerance, and mutual respect. We say that openly and unambiguously.

Hosting the Lambeth Conference on our campus provides an opportunity to promote our fundamental values on an international stage – using this platform to influence debate and ensure unrepresented voices are heard at the conference. However, the Lambeth Conference Steering Group, which I lead, understands the serious and sincere concerns of many in our staff and student body, and we share those concerns. We also hope that there is more to be gained through engagement and dialogue than through disengagement. It is in that spirit of supporting the many people, within and beyond the Church, who are working hard for change that the University agreed to host the Lambeth Conference in 2022.

Ahead of the conference, we are working closely with the organisers, and our LGBTQ+ staff and student networks, to ensure there is a platform for LGBTQ+ voices to be heard ahead of and alongside the event. Through a joint statement of expected behaviours, there is assurance that the conference will be conducted in a way that accords with our fundamental values, ensuring the safety and rights of our community are fully respected. Throughout the process, we will reaffirm our commitment to LGBTQ+ people across the world, promoting the legal and civic safeguards which are required to underpin equality and safety for all, however differently experienced they may be even in our own country.

We are developing, with our LGBTQ+ groups, measures to support and ensure the safety and wellbeing of staff and students as well as a programme of activities that in the coming weeks will celebrate and promote equality, diversity and inclusivity and support continued progress towards a world free from prejudice and discrimination. This includes the University’s continued sponsorship and support of Canterbury Pride next week as well as our new sponsorship of Medway Pride later in the summer.

Further information on this full programme of activities will be available in the coming weeks.

Congratulations to Professor Gordon Lynch for being appointed as the Director of the Graduate and Researcher College.

Gordon is Michael Ramsey Professor of Modern Theology at Kent and has substantial experience both in developing doctoral training and in research leadership, including serving as the sub-panel chair for Theology and Religious Studies for REF2021. His research has crossed a number of disciplines within the humanities and social sciences and he has undertaken a range of public engagement and impact work with think-tanks, educational organisations, museums and national abuse inquiries.

On his appointment, Gordon has commented, ‘This is an important time for the University as we seek to provide the best possible educational and research environment for our postgraduate students and academic staff in the context of wider national changes. I’m delighted to have the opportunity to take on this role and look forward to working with colleagues as we take this forward.’

When: Thursday 16– Saturday 18 June 2022
Where: At the British Academy Summer Showcase, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1Y 5AH
Tickets are free but registration is needed
Link and programme:https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/events/british-academy-summer-showcase-2022/programme-exhibits/

Dr David Garbin, Senior Lecturer in SSPSSR, will contribute to the prestigious Summer Research Showcase Festival organised by the British Academy in central London on 16-18 June. He is curating an exhibition on urban sustainability and the informal economies and ecologies of waste tyres in mega-city Lagos (Nigeria).

The tyre is a truly global commodity, a symbol of historic dependency on motor vehicles. But in a mega-city like Lagos, the problem of waste tyres is particularly acute: end-of-life tyres (ELTs) are discarded on the streets, in waterways, stockpiled or burned. Non-biodegradable, stockpiled ELTs can pose significant fire hazards and become a breeding ground for malarial mosquitos.

Used tyres are not only the by-products of deficient, pot-holed and overburdened road infrastructures, they are at the heart of a thriving – mostly informal – roadside economy of small garages, vulcanizers as well as an ‘upcycling’ sector (dominated by female workers), through which tyres are repurposed in many ways.

The project explores the complex relationships between waste, sustainability, creativity and wellbeing in the use and re-use of tyres across economic, infrastructural and social domains of the mega-city, using Lagos as a case study.

The exhibition draws upon data collected as part of the ‘Pneuma-city’ project (2019-2022) which Dr David Garbin leads as Principal Investigator, working in collaboration with award-winning visual artist Andrew Esiebo. The exhibition will showcase photography, video as well as innovative tyre-based installations and material culture of tyre repurposing. The project is supported by a £300k award from the Global Challenges Research Funds as part of the wider ‘Cities and Infrastructure of Well-Being’ Programme.

The project is a collaboration between the Universities of Kent, York, Toronto, and Lagos and is truly multidisciplinary as it combines Urban Anthropology, Sustainability Science, Material Engineering, Urban Planning and Sociology of Work.

A reminder to colleagues in grade 10 and above as well as academic colleagues in the Division of Arts & Humanities, that the University is currently offering a short-life Voluntary Severance Scheme. The scheme is open for applications until 5pm on Monday June 13 and full details have been sent to eligible staff.

As we continue on our path to financial sustainability we must continue to explore opportunities for potential savings when they are available. With some available funds available this financial year we have the opportunity now to do that and so can offer this scheme for colleagues who may be considering leaving the University.  If you any questions about the scheme, please contact the central Employee Relations Team at VSscheme@kent.ac.uk or, alternatively, via your own HR Manager.

For those for whom the severance scheme is not suitable, the University also has a number of existing options available to staff across the organisation who are looking to move on at a time that is right for both them and their division/directorate. These include efficiency retirement, flexible/phased retirement, ill health retirement as well as our existing voluntary redundancy package. If you would like an informal, confidential conversation about any of these schemes please contact your local HR Manager.

When: Monday 20th June 2022

Where: Darwin Conference Suite, Canterbury campus

Rethinking assessment and feedback designs for learning enhancement

As teachers, we are designers.  How we design assessments and opportunities for feedback enactment are critical aspects of teaching practice.  Assessment design offers a key point of leverage for enhancing education, because many students strategically focus on it. While students may skim assigned readings or skip lectures, they must complete assessments to progress.  Higher education assessment also structures many hours of students’ independent effort and influences classroom preparatory activities educators design. Thus, improving assessment can have a big impact on student learning.

Likewise, feedback can be one of the most powerful ways of enhancing students’ learning if students are prepared to seek out or use all available sources of feedback to improve their subsequent work.  Teachers can and do design opportunities into their curricula for students to receive, interpret, and act on feedback.  Those opportunities can act as a bridge between the assessments students are completing and the teaching environment. Students harnessing the power of diverse potential feedback sources that exist within the learning environment is one area that is developing within feedback research and practice. The challenge for teachers is how we help our students to attend to a wider range of sources of feedback information.

The programme for the conference is now available here.  Presentations are grouped into the categories of ‘Authentic Assessment’ and ‘Formative Feedback’.  The conference will be opened by Professor Richard Reece, Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Education and Student Experience, and other highlights include a keynote speech from Dr Edd Pitt and Professor Kathleen M. Quinlan of the Centre for the Study of Higher Education (CSHE), workshop-style activity sessions, poster presentations, and the award of this year’s University Teaching Prizes and Diversity Mark Award.

To book a place at the conference, please sign up via Eventbrite by 13 June 2022.