The School of Music and Fine Art again has two Fine Art graduates through to the first stage of the Platform graduate award exhibition at the Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate.

This year, Luiza Jordan and Tayler Goatier have been selected and their work is being exhibited at the Turner until Sunday 5 November.

The winners of the first round going through to the final will be announced at a special event on Tuesday 24th October at the Gallery. In the five-year existence of the Platform Graduate Award, fine art students from SMFA have won the final award twice, in 2015 and 2017.  The award includes all the major fine art art degree courses in the South East of England outside London. This is a spectacular achievement!

Luiza Jordan works with space and architecture and explores the uses of material in relation to gender. Large immersive clusters of material evolve in raw, organic processes as her interventions attempt to find hidden connections between materials, spaces, buildings and architecture. By using places of transition, and situating her work in spaces with industrial and institutional sensibilities, she injects a sense of new, feminine, unbound and constantly mutating life. You can follow Luiza on Instagram here and see her portfolio on her website.

Tayler Goatier works primarily in sculpture and installation. Being diagnosed with Osteogenesis Imperfecta (Brittle Bones Disease) at the age of 1, Goatier spent the majority of her childhood in hospital making art. Her current practice explores disability. Using herself as her main source of research, she explains the physicality of her condition by using meringues as a metaphor for her fragility and constant reconstruction to her own skeleton. She is also a food blogger. Recent exhibitions include Reverberate, The University of Kent, 2017 and WE ARE HUMAN-ISH, Canterbury, 2017.

For further information see the Turner Contemporary webpages.

Don’t forget that the deadline is approaching for applications to the Short-Term Enhanced Efficiency Retirement Scheme.

The scheme provides an opportunity for academics who have a good past service record, but don’t feel that they themselves will be able to make an optimum contribution to the next REF, and who meet the eligibility criteria, to request to leave the University with a severance payment of one year’s salary.

The scheme is open for applications until 31 October 2017, with successful applicants leaving the University on dates to be agreed from January 2018 onwards. Further details of the scheme and the timetable are available on the HR webpages.

Enhance your CV and improve your employability by taking a Study Plus course in something different from your main area of study.

Study Plus courses are non-credit bearing and are FREE to all Kent students. There is a wide variety of courses, which allow you to explore your creative side as well as learning new skills to help you during your studies and when you graduate. If you have good attendance on a Study Plus course, you will earn Employability Points and the course will appear on your Higher Education Achievement Report (HEAR).

Build your employability and business skills with a Business Start-Up Workshop with HIVE and Kent Invicta Chamber of Commerce. Or learn how to become a student mentor with Student Mentoring at University. Both of these courses take place at the Medway campus with many more launching soon.

You can sign up for a course via Workshops in the Student Data System

Visit the Study Plus website to view the full range of courses, and find out more.

Learning a language can enhance your communication and intercultural skills as well as being fun!

The Centre for English and World Languages offers 20 week courses in French (Beginners) and Japanese (Beginners and Post-Beginners) at the Medway campus. Classes will begin on 11 October 2017.

We are currently offering 50% discount for the first 35 Kent students who apply reducing the cost to just £110 for the whole course.

Kent staff can apply for funding from Learning and Development.

Visit the Language Express website to find out more and to book.

Colleagues will be saddened to learn that Vic George died suddenly last Monday.

Vic will be remembered as a kindly, self-effacing and scholarly man who did much to shape the careers of his colleagues and contributed greatly to the discipline through his teaching and his many books. These include the seminal Ideology and Social Welfare and Globalization and Human Welfare and British Society and Social Welfare (with Paul Wilding), European Welfare Futures, Major Thinkers in Welfare​, Modern Thinkers on Welfare (with Robert Page) and many others.

Vic originally trained as a social worker and worked in London as a child care officer. He carried out research on social security at LSE. His first book, Social Security, was the subject of a Guardian editorial. He then moved to Nottingham and to Kent in 1973, where he was the founding Professor of Social Policy and Administration. He retired in 1998. He will be missed by many in the discipline.​

 The funeral will be at Barham Crematorium at 14.00 on Tuesday 10 October.

Chris Morrison, Copyright Support and Software Licensing Manager at Kent, is the originator of Copyright the Card Game.

The game is an an open educational resource created to teach those in educational and cultural institutions about the way copyright law impacts on teaching and research. The game has been downloaded over 2,500 times and is used widely throughout the UK and other countries to communicate messages about copyright and risk management.

Chris is running two sessions in October, which offer participants the opportunity to:

• Understand the subject matter that copyright protects (works)
• Explore the types of usage which copyright restricts
• Become familiar with the types of licences that allow use of copyright material in education
• Understand the key copyright ‘exceptions’ that allow teachers and researchers to use copyright works without permission
• Apply all of the above to a number of educational scenarios in groups

The two dates are as follows:

• Wednesday 4 October, 14.00-16.30
• Thursday 26 October, 10.00-12.30

Please email C.Morrison@kent.ac.uk  if you would like to attend one of these sessions and you will be sent an invite. As always, please get your line manager’s position before you do.