Vice-Chancellor’s Council Update: 28 April meeting

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  The first meeting of the new term focused on the draft University Strategic Plan 2025–2030 and the annual presentation of the Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Education).
• Council also approved funding for an improved wireless networking platform.

Council’s first meeting of this new term was, as usual, the shorter meeting held online. The main focus of the agenda was on the draft University Strategic Plan 2025–2030, and the annual presentation from Professor Martin Williams, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Education) as Chair of the Education Committee.

The draft University Strategic Plan has been brought together by the Strategic Plan Programme Board, consisting of the PVCs, Heads of Division and representatives from the Conference of Colleges. College and Divisional representatives were involved in the initial drafting, over the summer of 2024. Council was asked at this meeting to provide feedback on the draft so that it can be refined by its next meeting in week 4, following which we will be inviting comments from across the collegiate University. The final Strategic Plan, taking into account feedback received, will be presented to Council for approval in Michaelmas term. The plan is focused on areas where we can collaborate over the next five years, as a collegiate University and externally, to take advantage of opportunities and rise to challenges, and to maintain our world-leading position in teaching and research. Look out for more on this in the next Council blog.

You may have seen in my start of term video message that Professor Martin Williams will be stepping down from his role as PVC (Education) at the end of this academic year. There will be further opportunity to thank him for his years of hard work on navigating through the Covid-19 pandemic and improving access for underrepresented groups, but at this meeting he presented his last annual update to Council as Chair of Education Committee.

The update was a look back at Martin’s eight-year tenure in figures. Progress has clearly been made in that time on diversifying the undergraduate student body, with an increase in students from disadvantaged backgrounds from 11% to 14% since 2018, and an increase in UK-domiciled Black and Minority Ethnic students from 18% to 30% in that time. There remains work to do with our postgraduate intake, which the Postgraduate Access Strategy will define later this term. More of our students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, are being supported financially thanks to an increase in scholarship funding, and again this is always something we are working on improving.

Council also approved funding for the deployment of a modern, enterprise wireless platform across the University to improve wireless networking as part of our ongoing digital transformation. The project will prioritise buildings where the existing wireless service is poor.

I hope that this blog helps to demystify Council and its discussions. Please let us know if you found it useful or have any feedback: you can submit feedback via vice-chancellor@admin.ox.ac.uk.

Council information, including minutes, is published on the website.

Information on the Committees of Council can also be found online.

We encourage all staff to consider putting themselves forward for committees and other governance groups: our current elections page provides relevant information.