If you get an email from a University of Kent supplier, external agent or a named contact that you usually work with, always follow the steps below.

Some of our known suppliers and external contacts are currently being impersonated, and the fraudulent emails we’re seeing can be very convincing. Business contact lists are being hacked to make fake emails look legitimate,

• If there’s an attached invoice or document that you weren’t expecting, don’t preview it or open it. Contact the supplier separately from the email to check legitimacy.
• If offered a link to sign into your account, don’t click the link. Go to their website using a web browser to sign in.
• If the email gives you their new banking details, phone a known contact to check legitimacy.
• Check the sender email address: double-click on it to see it in full. Does it look right?

All staff need to always take this cautious approach.

• If in doubt about a supplier email, contact procurement@kent.ac.uk
• If in doubt about any email, ask IT helpdesk to check it out for you.

More email security advice from the University

1 October 2018 saw the launch of the University’s first ever sustainable food strategy, which provides a road map for increasing the sustainability of our food offering from field to fork and beyond. The strategy supports the University’s overall response to the climate crisis and meets ever increasing demand for more sustainable options across our campuses’ menus.

Now a year on into improving the sustainability of the food served across campus, the Sustainable Food Steering Group would like to share some of the key achievements that have been accomplished in the strategy’s first year. The combined efforts of all those involved were highlighted in the People and Planet University League table with the points received in the sustainable food section, alongside engagement and education, giving Kent a boost up league from 101 to 40^th.

Rutherford Kitchen has changed it produce supplier meaning fruit and vegetables are now being sourced from local growers. This mean that the menu in Rutherford can be adapted by the chefs regularly to reflect the seasons and share the best of southern produce.

Kent Union have been working hard to support the Sustainable Food Strategy and were instrumental in pushing for reusable water bottles and coffee cups to be made more available and visible. All staff members can claim a water bottle at any Kent Hospitality outlet, and students that moved into accommodation on campus received a free water bottle and coffee cup. Bed and board students also received a reusable food container that can be traded in for a clean one each time they use it at bed and board outlets.

Kent Hospitality released new menus across their Canterbury and Medway outlets, increasing their vegan options available. Their efforts have been recognised by PETA, who have included the University of Kent on their list of 20 Most Vegan-Friendly Universities. In addition to this, many of the new vegan and vegetation items replaced red meat items that were previously on the menus as part of an effort to reduce carbon and water intensive food items from our offering.

All fish served in meals across our outlets is now Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certified. This ensures that no fish we serve is on the ‘fish to avoid list’ for species of conservation concern, and that we have full traceability on where that fish came from.

K Bar have gone disposable coffee cup free, meaning all customers are encouraged to drink in or have their reusable cup at the ready.

The Gulbenkian are taking part in FutureProof and their project, ‘Project Zero,’ aims to eliminate as much waste as possible from their operations. So far they have:

• removed all single use plastic bottles in the café, saving over 30000 plastic bottles since August 2018,
• switched to re-usable plastic pint and half pint cups which significantly reduced their single use plastic cup buying,
• partnered with ‘Too Good To Go’ and each month sell around 70 bags of food, which would normally be thrown away,
• sent their milk bottle caps (around 300 caps a week) to a company that reuse the plastic

The waste team have begun a food waste trial with six outlets across the University with the waste being sent to an anaerobic digestion facility in Essex, where they produce bio fertilisers for farmers and other growers.

The sustainable food steering group will continue to share our progress against the strategy so please keep an eye on updates in each of the outlets and on campus online.

For more information please email sustainability@kent.ac.uk

Want to have a break from your routine and try something new? The term 1 Let’s Play timetable includes netball, basketball, badminton, running, This Girl Can Lift, Beginners hockey and touch tennis. Why not get active, have fun, meet friends and join us for any of the sessions?

This is your chance to give these activities a go! Sessions are free to staff and student Kent Sport Premium Plus and Premium members; or pay £2 per person per session with Plus and Pay to Play membership. Kent Sport membership benefits and prices are available on the website.

“My life in Kent would definitely have been different without Let’s Play. I never thought playing sports would be that amusing; but now I actually fall in love with it, especially badminton. Let’s Play is very enjoyable and carefree as it is all about having fun. I like the variety of sports provided which enables me to try out different things and learn new skills. It is also nice to make new friends during the activities and have fun together.” Karen – Let’s Play participant.

For more information about the activities visit the Let’s Play webpage. Or pop into the University of Kent Sports Centre and pick up our Active Kent activities booklet. To keep up to date, follow @LetsPlayKent on Twitter or like us on Facebook.

See you at the next session!

Great news! We now offer Reflexology at Kent Sport Physiotherapy Clinic!

We are currently offering taster sessions at £20 for 30 minutes from Monday 14 October to Friday 1 November.

What is Reflexology?

Reflexology is non-invasive, complementary therapy and is a thousand-year-old practice that focuses on massaging the acupressure points in the feet or hands to relieve stress, illness, pain and stimulate mental, emotional, physical healing and well-being in all the body systems.  It builds stress resistance and rejuvenates by stimulating meridians, circulation and the nerve systems by flushing and detoxing.

How does Reflexology work?

Each area of the foot, hand, eye, face and ear connects via nerves and electromagnetic energy (chi) channels (“meridians”) to a particular body organ and system. By massaging that area, it stimulates and flushes that area.

The benefits of Reflexology:

•  Stress relief
• Relaxation
• Hormone balance
• Depression
• Anxiety
• Insomnia
• Balance immune system
• Lower blood pressure
• Support digestive system
• Respiratory disorders (asthma)
• Sinusitis
• Menopause

For more information or to book in, please call us on 01227 824375 or contact physio@kent.ac.uk.

As part of the 2019/20 e-learning forum series, the e-learning team is excited to invite colleagues to the upcoming session ‘Ombea – the story so far’ on Tuesday 29th October 12.00-13.30 in the UELT seminar room.

This session will not only introduce the Ombea audience response / in-class polling system (currently funded to the end of the 2020/21 academic year) but also look at engagement from academic and professional service colleagues to date, and feature guest speakers sharing their experience of how they have used the system as part of their own practice.

All staff are welcome.  The session will be recorded via KentPlayer for colleagues who cannot make it to the Canterbury campus.

To book a place, please complete the online booking form.

Student Union President Sasha Langeveldt will be sleeping out this winter to raise money for a local homelessness charity. Can you help her?

On Saturday 19 October 2019 the Rotary Club of Canterbury Sunrise and Porchlight are inviting a group of local people and community leaders to take part in a one-night Sleep Out. 

Sasha says: “By taking part in this event, I hope to raise awareness and funds for Porchlight; a charity that supports and helps those who are and have suffered from homelessness. Porchlight provides many services from street outreach and supported accommodation to education and employment assistance which enables people to leave homelessness behind.

“Homelessness can happen to anyone, it can be an unexpected life changing experience that anyone can face today. For this reason, it is extremely important to do what we can to help all those who need a little more support. I have personally seen what this can do to a person’s life and I want to actively work towards challenging the stigma around homelessness.” 

You can help Sasha raise money to tackle local homelessness by clicking here.

Organising for Success brings together various strands of work to help ensure we are equipped to deliver our Kent 2025 strategy. We aim to be a community that empowers students from a wide range of backgrounds to find and shape their place in the world, and where academics are free to explore and deepen our understanding of it. We want staff to enhance each other’s work and feel part of a common identity.

To  support this, we are working towards creating seven new academic divisions. These will help us to deliver a first-class student experience and empower staff, while in turn helping us free up staff time to focus on work that will enable us to make a step change in our teaching and research performance. The project is now in its implementation phase, with five core strands of activity required to deliver it.

Update on Directors of Division recruitment
We are currently in the process of recruiting the seven new Directors of Division who will lead our new academic divisions. These are key appointments for the University, with the successful candidates joining our Executive Group and helping to shape our future – we therefore need make sure we do all we can to recruit the right candidates for the role.

For a number of reasons, we have not been able to secure applicants to interview for all of the divisions and will therefore be re-advertising for three of them. This will again be open to internal candidates only, so that we can make sure we have fully explored the potential for internal staff to take on the positions before we potentially widen our search externally.

The divisions we are re-advertising are:

-Computing, EDA and SMSAS

-Anthropology and Conservation, Politics & International Relations, Economics and Pyschology

-Kent Law School, SSPSSR and Journalism

The job adverts for these are now live, with a closing date of  23.59 on Sunday 10 November. Find out more on how to apply via the HR website.

Project Governance
Organising for Success is governed by an Oversight Group, supported by a Project Operational Group and subsequent strand project teams. We have recently published a full project governance document with full details on structure and membership, along with Terms of Reference for the Oversight Group and Project Operational Group

Find out more on the Governance section of the Organising for Success website.

The All Party Parliamentary Group on Social Care has acknowledged “a great debt of gratitude” to a team led by Kent Law School Professor Lydia Hayes for providing “expansive, thorough and vigorous” research in support of their All-Party Inquiry into the care sector workforce.

Professor Hayes explained: ‘We investigated how care workers could be better supported to develop as career professionals and why this was necessary. We analysed care standards regulation in each of the UK’s four nations and identified the complex skills that care workers need.’

With financial support from the GMB Union, Professor Hayes collaborated with Dr Eleanor Johnson and Alison Tarrant to produce the report ‘Professionalisation At Work in Adult Social Care’.  It provides a picture of professionalisation in adult social care across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and is cited frequently in the APPG Inquiry Report entitled ‘Elevation, Registration & Standardisation: The Professionalisation of Social Care Workers’.  To support the Inquiry, the research team considered policy initiatives, current skill and knowledge requirements, workforce registration, induction, training and the legal regulation of workforce standards.

In an introduction to the Inquiry Report, Louise Haigh MP and Gillian Keegan MP said: ‘We owe a great debt of gratitude to Dr Hayes, Dr Johnson and Alison Tarrant for their expansive, thorough and vigorous report to us, which has proved to be a great help in increasing our understanding of how this sector presently functions, and the challenges that it faces.’

As a result of their research, Professor Hayes’s team found that training issues, workers’ occupational registration, regulatory concern for service-user safety, terms and conditions of work, and sector funding are intricately connected.

Professor Hayes is Principal Investigator for a Wellcome Trust project on The Legal and Social Life of Care Standards Regulation in England, Scotland and Wales.

Colleagues are invited to attend the CSHE Seminar on Thursday 17 October,16.00-17.00, in Kennedy Seminar Room 10. The seminar titled ‘Why and how we need to research White students’ racial ignorance’ will be presented virtually by Dr Nolan Cabrera, Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona.

In this presentation, Dr Cabrera will outline his concept of White immunity, link it to structured White ignorance, and then explore what this means in terms of the educational experiences of Students of Colour.

To register to attend please complete the online booking form.

A new website for staff provides information about current negotiations over the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS).

The USS dispute is a national one with a large number of organisations involved. Earlier this year, the University and College Union (UCU) took the most recent employer proposals to a ballot of its members, calling for industrial action.

The University of Kent’s Executive Group (EG) has expressed regret over the current situation, but has been working at both national and local level to try and help reach a national agreement and assist employees who have to pay increased contributions.

EG has also been lobbying hard for Universities UK (UUK) to enter into direct dialogue with the UK Pensions Regulator and to involve the UCU in this process.

As well as outlining the University’s position and what EG is doing to help, the new website includes a summary of the current situation and background to the USS pensions negotiations.

Find out more on the USS Pension Changes website.