Securing Success Campus Forum - Campbelltown

Transcript

University of Western Sydney

Securing Success Campus Forum - Campbelltown

Campbelltown Campus, 30.G.213

Friday,17 October 2014 at 11.30am

KRYSTYNA POLLARD: Hello, everybody, and welcome here to Campbelltown campus today to the "Securing Success" Campus Forum. My name is Krystyna Pollard and I'll be your host for today. I'd like to welcome our audience here and all those watching online throughout the university.

I'd like to introduce our executive panel participants to my right: Clive Smallman, the Dean of the School of Business; Linda Taylor, Pro ViceChancellor (International); Barney Glover, ViceChancellor and President; Michele Symons, Dean of the School of Education; and Simeon Simoff, the Dean of the School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics.

BARNEY GLOVER: Thank you to everyone for coming along. I think we have hopefully a growing number of people watching us in live stream. This is the second live stream that we've done other members of the executive, we did one earlier in the year about the higher education reform agenda. It was a very interesting exercise. We thought it was successful enough to continue to use technology to connect. So hopefully people will not only watch and listen in to this discussion, but also contribute questions and other things later.

What I'd like to do initially with colleagues on the panel is to talk a little bit about the paper itself, "Securing Success", and touch on a few of the pieces of feedback we've had about it already, and I must say across all of the forums that I've attended the conversation has been very positive, not without some challenging suggestions and very constructive criticism of aspects of the paper which we appreciate.

We're certainly keen to collect together all of that feedback and not only to ensure that we take account of it apparently I've said everything and my mic isn't working. Hopefully we're okay now. Is that okay? All right, good.

So we are collecting together, as I said, all of the feedback, and in my office they will be helping to produce a spreadsheet showing the feedback we've received and how we've responded to it. Please, if you don't have an opportunity to make a comment today in the live stream, send through any comments, questions or concerns that you might have and we will post them and we will respond to them.

The process from here involves developing a draft strategic plan for the Board of Trustees in December, and it will remain with them for their feedback until the early part of next year, we'll do a circulation of that draft document for further consultation, and it will be in the early part of 2015 that we bring back the final version for endorsement by the Board of Trustees.

One of the reasons for doing that is that we're still not sure what is going to happen in the Senate with the reform agenda. We can have a bit of a discussion about that if people would like during the question and answer session in terms of how it impacts on a strategy, but at the moment it is still in Senate committee. It's coming out next week for further debate in the Senate. We're not quite sure when that is going to finish. I think we need to take account of that in finalising the documents.

So there is a little more process to go through, and despite that, I think it's very important that we're doing this now and not leaving it until 2015, because if aspects of the reform agenda do go ahead, then we need to be very prepared for that and a strategic plan is a critical part of that. So I think we are on track in developing both this strategic plan, but in parallel with doing other things.

We have the Research and Development Strategic Plan that Scott Holmes has been discussing around the university, and that is I think now in its almost final form, which is very encouraging, and Linda will be working on the international plan she'll say a little bit more about that in a moment and we'll be announcing our new Deputy ViceChancellor (Academic) in the next few days. I'm very pleased about the appointment we've made, it's a very exciting appointment, and I think that person will pick up where KerriLee Krause has left off in terms of our academic program and strategic planning around that. We'll be doing parallel processing on things over the course of the next six months.

With this paper, we deliberately decided not to put out a draft strategic plan. It is a discussion paper, so it is meant to lead to what I hope will be, and what I'm seeing already is, rich and positive feedback. Within that context, it's certainly meant to be giving some clear direction, though, about the university and it builds off the Directions 2020 paper which was released earlier this year.

I won't go through the detail of that again I think people have had a chance to see that paper but it highlighted three things in particular as challenges for the University of Western Sydney. One was in the international space and reflecting on our relatively low numbers of international students inbound to study with us in Western Sydney and also the relatively small number of our students that have an outbound experience in the international domain. So that is an area of some challenge. It's certainly reflected in the fact that compared to other institutions of a similar size our postgraduate is very low, about 40% of what we anticipate it should be, and finally a reflection on the fact that our research funding is not coming from as diverse a range of sources as we would like, and we need to address that.

So there were some very clear challenges for the university overlaid with all of the particular challenges external to the university around reform and so on. Those themes have been captured, I think, in the "Securing Success" discussion paper, so I'm looking forward to your feedback.

We'll hopefully go to a slide there are very few PowerPoint slides. Hopefully people involved in the live stream can see the PowerPoint. The first one is about Mission, Values and Vision for the university. When we looked at various iterations of this paper, the Senior Executive discussed whether it was timely to revisit the mission, the values and the vision. We certainly felt, on reading the mission statement, that we weren't easily able to identify a reason as to why we would be changing it. It seems to say all the things we believe are important in the format of a mission statement and it does speak directly to Greater Western Sydney, and that's important for this institution. So we haven't necessarily suggested changes there, but we would be interested in feedback on that.

Similarly, with the values there was some discussion, even at the Board of Trustees, and the Board of Trustees, when they saw a previous version of this discussion paper, certainly were impressed with it and they were certainly very supportive of the direction it was taking the university. They did make suggestions, and they've been incorporated into the version that has gone out for consultation, and they certainly commented about the values and whether or not some in a sense should be given and we should focus on a fewer number of values and ensure the university is very strong in promoting those values and ensuring that they're reflected in our actions and across our students and staff.

But it's not necessarily a very valuable process to start suggesting that we change the values of the organisation. So rather than step in and say that, I think we need to reflect on it, and I'd again be appreciative of comments. I think they all stand scrutiny and I think they're all very valid and we all would acknowledge them as being very important, I think.

Finally, the vision statement again, some discussion about this and the sense I think generally that it might be timely to reconsider the vision statement. It does refer to "bringing knowledge to life", which has been the catch phrase of the university for some time now. Some people have a strong sense of association with that, which is fine.

It's no accident that this particular discussion paper is called "Securing Success", and that partly comes off a quite significant project that is under way, and has been under way for some time, around rebranding UWS in the context of the sort of competitive environment that we're in. It's a valuable thing for a university to do from time to time to consider its brand and its brand presence, and certainly the idea of securing success and a range of other variations on that has come through a lot of the focus group work with prospective students and stakeholders, it has been under way for some time. So we have taken something of a liberty by branding this particular document "Securing Success 2015 to 2020".

Coming back to the vision statement, we are interested in your input to that. I'd be keen to hear your comments a little bit later, or fed through to us at a later date.

Now, the next slide is the only slide of any substance that I really want to put up beyond the Mission, Values and Vision. This is really to capture a diagram about the suggested strategic goals for the university for 2015 to 2020, and there are six of them. The reason the diagram resonated quite strongly with the Board of Trustees is it tries to capture in a sense not so much a hierarchy, but to demonstrate that there is an overarching goal for the university and there are a series of other very important pillars and there is a very strong and important underlying strategic goal for the institution in the way in which we're envisaging the plan.

So we're trying to be distinctive in the way we put out this strategic planning document. In the process of getting to this point, we did explore strategic plans that had been released by universities around Australia in recent times over the last year or so and we also looked internationally at strategic planning documents, particularly in the United States. When you're thinking that we might be in a deregulated environment, possibly that's the closest thing to a deregulated higher education system in the world, and looking at how their universities might position themselves strategically in that context seemed a sensible thing to do. Not surprisingly, strategic plans for universities don't necessarily change all that dramatically from place to place or system to system, but nevertheless I think it was useful to reflect on plans from different parts of the world. So we do want to try to make a statement that is somewhat distinctive even in that context of similarity between strategic plans.

So we have across the top a distinctive "studentcentred university". We wanted to send a very strong message that in a highly competitive higher education system we need to be very focused on our students and it should be not so much one of six strategic priorities for the university; it should be the overarching priority and it should be something that we test ourselves against repeatedly.

Now, there is a quite contentious quote in the "Securing Success" discussion paper and it talks about the student as a customer. If I was to comment on the feedback from other sessions, it's one of the topics that has come up in a number of ways and people are quite critical of that reference to the student as a customer, as they are about a number of other ways in which we've tried to capture some of the urgency of change in higher education. I'll get to that in a moment.

So I think it is something that we did, but after some considerable conversation about it and we tried to place it in context and if you have read the quote in full, as I'm sure you have, you get a sense of what it's trying to say and it comes off the back of a lot of work that has been done on the way businesses respond to a changing regulatory environment and when they change, they generally, if they're successful, are very much focused on the needs of their clients, their customers, their stakeholders. That becomes their focus and in fact is a characteristic of success, the extent to which that's a successful strategy.

So for us it's not an unreasonable position to put, but of course students and customers are not necessarily, and certainly we wouldn't want to suggest it, in the same context, and that has come through strongly in a number of forums. In particular, at the Chairs of Academic Boards forum that we held recently there was a lot of lively discussion about that and I think it reflects a very strong intent that we reconsider that characterisation, but not necessarily the intent behind it.

So students being at the centre is critical to us, and if you look in the document you'll see that we've tried to explain what that studentcentredness might mean, and so there is a context to it. But it's deliberately seen as overarching and importantly as a distinctive focus.

Then there are a number of pillars in the way this diagram has been prepared and it indicates a vibrant, researchled university with a regional, national, international focus and of course focusing on impact. I think Scott has been out there with the R&D plan talking about this right across the university, about this recognition, growing recognition, of the importance of research impact.

Earlier this week the Federal Government released its industry statement and the connection between industry, innovation and development and research in Australia and the importance of directing public investment into research to support the development of our industry sectors, and I think there is an important recognition of the impact that research has to have in that context. So I think it's an important conversation for us to have, an important direction for us to lay down, and it's important for any university in Australia, or elsewhere, to be very much focused on being researchled.

Then there is a pillar that talks very sensibly about our teaching and learning environment, about flexibility and about responsiveness. It tries to capture one characteristic of the university that I think is very important that we need to maintain, and it is often a comment made to me, and that is the strength of the connection that our students often feel to their academic staff, the accessibility of our staff, which is something in an institution our size is actually quite surprising and we certainly don't want to, even in the virtual context, lose sight of that and how important it is and how important it is in the context of focusing on our students.

But of course we need to talk about the changing nature of higher education, the role that technology is going to play, the way blended learning and online learning will become very important over the five or sixyear period of this plan. So there is no doubting our commitment to quality and excellence and intellectual rigour in everything that we do, but at the same time we need to respond to the changing demands and expectations and needs of our students and the way we frame our teaching and learning program, the way we develop our new courses and the way in which we engage with our students supporting them in those programs.

Then, thirdly, there is a very important strategy that picks up on the Direction 2020 document around international and how we need to very significantly enhance our focus on international. So I thought I would pause for a moment and hand over to Linda, who has been talking to people in the relatively short while she has been with us. She joined us in August and her first day on the job was literally in Sri Lanka with the executive group that I took over there to Sri Lanka and to India and she has been on the go ever since engaging with people about international. I'll just ask Linda to say a few words about the international dimension of the plan.

LINDA TAYLOR: Thanks. I'll try. Look, I thought I'd start by introducing myself because I'm new to not only the University of Western Sydney but also the university sector. So you're new to me and I'd like to start by telling you a bit about myself.

I've come out of the public sector. I worked for many years in policy and industry development for the New South Wales Government. A lot of that time I was working on investment attraction from India and the Middle East and so I had a very deep understanding of the corporate cultures there.

I then moved to the development of education policy, international education, and set up Study New South Wales, so the New South Wales Government's investment in international education. On the way, I became very interested in knowledge as the most important currency between countries, so a lot of my focus as the Manager of the India Desk was looking at primary industry, secondary industry, and I felt that the biggest opportunity was really the exchange of research, commercialisation of research and knowledge as the real wheels that bind nations.

I went on to do a Churchill Fellowship looking at the research collaborations that India has with Germany and the UK to look at whether Australia could learn from that and what opportunities there were to generate greater public benefit from our research collaborations with India. So it was a natural thing for me in many ways to make the leap from that work in the public sector into the university sector and I bring with me a huge investment in the opportunity to link Australia, New South Wales, University of Western Sydney with our global partners.