What may change
Understand what will change and evolve for students.
We have been talking about how we need to organise ourselves so that we can lower our costs, whilst also taking the opportunity to learn about how we can do things differently to improve our student experience.
We anticipate there will be some changes, for example, how we manage our buildings, how we offer our support services and some modules and assessment changes. There are no changes to our core student services: Student Hub, Open Door and Disability.
Some of these changes will start from September 2024, but others will come into effect in 2025 and beyond. We do not close programmes midway through and we will always fulfil the learning outcomes so that students can progress and graduate.
We will continue to update students via our normal communication channels in advance of changes.
What may change
We have reviewed the costs to run the University and identified core areas where we can change. Key to this is always ensuring that we protect the most important aspects of our student experience, and help students to access services in more simple and straightforward ways. For this reason, most aspects of our teaching and core welfare services will be safeguarded, but it is important that where change is happening you know where, and why.
1. Changing our estate
Examples of how we’re reducing our estates costs and what might change include:
Changing how we use our buildings
Making better use of our campus space is not only an important part of our financial measures, but it will continue to be a key contributor to future environmental sustainability targets for the University. We have already announced that we will be moving teaching and learning out of Kings Manor in 2025 to save on costs and improve accessibility to the department.
Re-examining our big estate initiatives
We have paused or delayed some of our big investments, like building a new Student Centre. We will keep investing in our student experience - especially mental health and wellbeing, and study skills and support - but carefully managing our estates costs is a big focus.
2. Adapting our support services
We are always responding to the changing behaviours and patterns of usage of our support services to ensure we are meeting people’s needs, whilst balancing the use of our spaces as efficiently and effectively as possible.
We are using these insights to identify where we can evolve, and potentially even combine, some of our student support services across our Colleges, Receptions, the Library and Campus Safety. For example, we are reviewing the way we provide reception services within our Colleges, and our out of hours services with Campus Safety.
By combining some of our services together, we have the opportunity to make it simpler and clearer to students how they can access all of the support on offer.
Sometimes though, it might also mean taking the difficult decisions to close some underutilised services that we’ve provided in the past. How we go about this is really important, and we will always work to protect the student experience.
There are no changes to our core student services: Student Hub, Open Door and Disability.
3. Modules and assessment changes
You may experience some changes to the number of optional modules offered, because we have reviewed modules that have very small numbers - which we don’t think offers you the best student experience. Instead, we have ensured you are able to choose from modules that we know are popular.
We want to support future modules that attract a lot of interest and there will be more consistency for those students on combined programmes or taking electives. We have also introduced interdisciplinary optional modules to enable you to try new things.
We have reviewed the number of assessments and their word count, in order to reduce the assessment burden on students and eliminate areas we were over-assessing; we know this was a concern for some of you.
You are therefore likely to see changes in the future to how your learning is assessed and marked. For some students, this may mean fewer assessments overall, less bunching of assessments, and fewer assessments per module. This allows us to focus on more meaningful feedback.
More broadly, we are thinking very carefully about any impacts on core programme redesign, so that we don’t disrupt current students and importantly, so that we can protect the student experience.
If we do propose any significant programme change that affects current students, we will always consult with you, and we listen and respond to feedback to inform any decisions. We also work closely with our Student Union representatives.
4. Managing with fewer staff
As well as reducing money spent on our operational costs - like our estate - we also need to run the University with fewer people and we want our staff to focus on what matters most for high quality teaching and support. This means changing the way our staff work and what they spend their time on, to support their workload.
For example, we are looking at our teaching governance to reduce the number of committees, whilst also maintaining students' input into key decisions and ensuring that the student voice is heard.
We are also reviewing marking and assessment, as outlined in point 3 above.
Next steps
Universities across the UK are announcing cost cutting measures, including restructures, reorganisations and redundancies.
How we go about this is really important. We remain determined not only to protect the student experience and high-quality research, but we will face these difficulties with integrity, compassion and respect. No matter how challenging the situation, we are committed to managing our actions with care and sensitivity.
We’ll keep our plans under review as we measure how successful we have been in returning the University to a financial surplus. It’s really important we don’t take too long to get out of our current deficit.
York is one of only four universities to have won the top Gold Teaching Excellence Framework award and be in the top ten in the Research Excellence Framework (matched only by Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial), and we are acting now to preserve and protect the quality and impact of this teaching and research.