Update from George: college operations review
Wednesday 03-04-2019 - 09:48
Many students are incredibly concerned about the ongoing review of college operations being carried out by the University, and these concerns are shared by myself and the SU Officer team.
For those of you who have not yet heard about the proposed changes to college operations, the University is currently carrying out a review of its resident student experience service, affecting housekeepers, caterers, porters and events management.
The University originally classed this review as having a ‘minor’ student impact, which meant, following the student consultation guidelines, that only Common Room Presidents were consulted about the changes. Common Room Presidents and the SU Officer team, however, didn’t believe this was an accurate assessment of the review’s impact. Following our requests, the University has since agreed to upgrade the student impact of the review to ‘moderate’.
In practice, this means that you can now have your say on the review, and that we will hold the University accountable for undertaking the consultation steps specified in the framework. The University have set up a separate email address for students to send in feedback on the proposed restructure. You can email feedback directly to wsestudent.consultation@durham.ac.uk.
We asked the University to provide more information on the proposed restructure and have achieved some progress on this. The job descriptions for the new roles and an organisational chart have now been made available on the University's webpages, which you may wish to take a look at when providing feedback.
I'm also currently working on a paper expressing students' views on the changes to go to the University Executive Committee meeting on 29 April, and will keep everyone updated on the work we're doing! You can follow me on Facebook or Twitter to get more immediate updates on our progress.
