This is the first in a new series of regular updates, setting out how the University is addressing the challenges of COVID-19 and keeping our students, staff and neighbouring communities safe.

This update is focused on how the University’s daily risk assessment framework helps us to quickly identify challenges, make informed decisions and address specific colleague concerns.

The University’s risk assessment framework

The Department for Education has set out four COVID response tiers that are specific to universities, colleges and schools. These detail the government’s expectations for teaching provision under different levels of risk, as assessed by Public Health England (PHE). Our community is currently assessed to be in Tier 1. This means we are expected to continue providing blended learning with face-to-face tuition until 3 December, when the government’s student travel “window” begins, followed by a temporary transition to full online provision by 9 December. We will also continue to follow public health guidance, including, for example, the appropriate use of face coverings.

Each university is also required by the government to provide a local Outbreak Plan, setting out both the safety mitigation in place and its approach for responding to any rise in COVID-19 cases on campus. Our own Outbreak Plan is underpinned by a robust multi-layered approach to risk management.

The first, foremost layer is our individual risk assessment process. This holistically assesses individual staff risk, taking both clinical and non-clinical factors into account, with the aim of safeguarding colleagues at most risk of adverse or serious reactions to COVID-19. If you are concerned about your safety and have not already done so, please make use of this individual risk assessment process at the earliest opportunity.

The next layer is our activity and space-based risk assessments. This includes regular assessments made by Campus Division, but also the risk assessments colleagues must make prior to undertaking education or research activities. For example, considering whether existing research risks have changed in light of our new COVID-secure working arrangements. This is all underpinned by our COVID Working Guide which sets out the overarching roles, responsibilities, mitigations and measures in place to reduce the risks to as low as is reasonably practicable.

Finally, monitoring the number of new and active cases in our community is central to our overall risk management approach. Following daily analysis of reported case numbers (including at living circle level), senior colleagues from across the University attend Daily Situation Review meetings with PHE and Bristol City Council where that data is reviewed in detail.

This Daily Situation Review process then feeds into PHE’s weekly Risk Assessment of the University. This is where we consider specific issues of concern raised by colleagues; issues such as background rates of infection and their cause; the effectiveness of our interventions and controls; and whether there is evidence that cases in our community are linked. It is also where PHE make their weekly recommendation on our overall operating model and COVID response tier.

This approach to risk management has prompted us to introduce several successful mitigations which have helped reduce the level of outbreak in our community, such as the deployment of Mobile Testing Units where they have been most needed.

As things stand, it’s encouraging to see that the daily number of new staff and student cases continues to fall – from 202 on 13 October to 31 on 11 November. In addition, the number of active cases in our community fell from a mid-October peak of 949 to 126 on 11 November. Over that same period, the seven-day rolling average has also fallen from 103 to 23.

I hope these figures provide some reassurance and demonstrate that the careful steps we are taking through our approach to risk management have helped reduce the risk of infection on campus. We will continue, of course, to do all we can to bring those case numbers down even further.

Thank you 

It was heartening to see the thanks and recognition shared by colleagues on last week’s livestream for the fantastic work of Professional Services colleagues across our community over these past few months. Your tireless efforts have indeed made our blended learning environment possible, helped keep us all safe, and ensured our University is functioning as best it can at this difficult time. Thank you!

If you’d like to send your own special message of thanks to a colleague or team across the University, don’t forget that our new Thanks and Recognition Wall is on hand to help you do just that. If you’ve not already done so, please consider sending a message and help make a colleague’s day.

I hope you’ve found this update useful. I’ll be sharing further updates in the coming weeks.

Black History Month 2020 provides an important and timely opportunity to explore Black history, to reflect on and celebrate the contribution of Black and Black heritage staff and students to our University, and to discuss ways in which we can deliver our shared commitment to addressing structural and cultural racism.

Bristol-based historian David Olusoga recently reflected that: ‘The summer of 2020 was one of those moments when it felt as if history’s fast-forward button had been pressed and the pace of historical events suddenly accelerated.”  Situated in the city that was at the heart of many of these events, we hope that our Black History Month celebrations and explorations will “be infused with the spirit of this remarkable year” in which many people have engaged with ideas of race and racism as never before.

Having created a University Anti-Racism Steering Group this summer, I have been proud to see us launch a range of initiatives to both promote Black History and help bring about positive change.

One of these initiatives was the launch last week of a landmark new £1,000,000 Bristol Black Scholarships Programme.  Access to higher education is one of the most powerful ways to foster social mobility and enable individuals to realise their life ambitions. Yet we know that Black and Black-heritage students have historically been under-represented at every level of study in higher education across the UK. We have been working to address this for some time through a range of targeted initiatives, but we want to go further to improve the diversity of our student population. This ambitious new initiative marks an important step in our work to address the historical under-representation of Black and Black-heritage students and make our University truly inclusive.  I am very grateful for the generous support of our alumni and friends who have contributed to its development.

Other important initiatives aim to address the effects of Britain’s colonial past on our institution. Earlier this year we committed to reviewing the names of buildings named after families with links to the slave trade.  I’m pleased that, as the first formal outcome of this work, we have renamed our Colston Street accommodation as ‘No.33’.  Research is also underway, led by Professor Olivette Otele, to inform our review of the names of other University buildings.

Professor Otele was also recently appointed as the Independent Chair of Bristol’s Commission on Race Equality (CORE) by the Mayor of Bristol, Marvin Rees. CORE will work to address experiences of inequality often experienced by Bristol’s BAME communities in areas such as education, employment, health, housing and criminal justice. I’m delighted that Dr Jane Khawaja and Dr Marie-Annick Gournet have also been appointed as Commissioners to support CORE’s work tackling structural inequalities across our city.

It is great to see a wealth of university-wide activities underway to decolonise our curriculum.  Bristol Institute of Learning and Teaching (BILT) have established a learning community to support this important work across our academic programmes.  In an exciting initiative, we have worked in partnership with CARGO (Charting African Resilience Generating Opportunities – a Bristol collective of artists, poets and filmmakers) to create UniversalCity – a digital platform to showcase African and African Diaspora-owned businesses and community organisations in Bristol, explore the heritage and history of key points of interest around our city, and encourage students and staff to join in voluntary work to support local communities.  It is really heartening that we have worked so productively with CARGO to open up new possibilities for socially-engaged inclusive education.  I am hopeful that this will foster deeper links with diverse communities across the city.

As part of this ongoing discussion, I look forward to chairing a virtual panel event, ‘Towards a decolonised University’, on 22 October. This public online event will explore the importance of critical engagement with the ways in which the knowledge and resources we encounter at university is shaped by the impact of colonial power structures, and how do we create solutions which addresses racism and colonial legacy in our university. You can find out more and register for the event here.

The student BME Network and SU events team has also organised an excellent programme of online events throughout October, so do take a look at what’s coming up.

Elsewhere, to celebrate the first anniversary of our Be More Empowered for Success programme, the University will be unveiling our new Be More Empowered for Success portraits. These compelling new portraits celebrate our staff and students from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic backgrounds and will be on public display in the Reception Room of the Wills Memorial Building from 23 October.

There are many more initiatives underway throughout October. These both complement and build on our existing Equality, Diversity and Inclusion workstreams.

I hope that you will join us at some of this year’s Black History Month events – to celebrate the diversity of our community, reflect on our institutional history and reaffirm our commitment to building an open and inclusive community.

Thank you to everyone who is helping us develop these initiatives. I look forward to updating you on further progress in the coming months.

Following the publication of our Institutional Statement on Race Equality in March, and as part of our response to the Black Lives Matter movement in June, the senior leadership team announced the establishment of a new Anti-Racism Steering Group.

The Group, co-chaired by myself and Dr Jane Khawaja, aims to help the University develop strategies and take action to address individual, cultural and structural racism across our institution. Reporting directly to University Executive Board (UEB), the Group will develop an institutional action plan focused on key pillars that will incorporate:

1. Teaching and Learning: to cohere with the attainment gap plan
2. Recruitment: of staff and students, to include widening participation
3. Naming: buildings and the crest
4. Support: for students and staff – harassment policies and training.
5. Governance: to include external validation and recognition
6. Research and Civic Engagement: connects to city partners and collaborative research

As you can see, the Group has a wide-ranging remit and will build upon many of the activities and initiatives that are already in place. These include (but are by no means limited to):

• Establishing the BAME Staff Network where colleagues can share a sense of community and work with us to ensure that BAME staff have a consistent and positive experience at the University;
• Setting targets to significantly increase the number of Black students and Asian students enrolling at the University by 2025;
• Creating the new post of Professor of the History of Slavery at the University, and the appointment of Professor Olivette Otele earlier this year;
• Signing-up to the Race Equality Charter (REC) and our ambition to submit for recognition in 2021;
• Delivering outreach work with local schools and community groups;
• Increasing our support for local communities, most recently by reaching out to the Changing Your Mindset group in Bristol to support young people’s success;
• Delivering the Insight into Bristol summer school programme which guarantees students who complete the programme an offer of a place at the university, usually at the contextual offer level;
• Launching Report and Support – a new online platform that offers staff and students a quick and easy way to report specific incidents;
• Developing our Stand Up Speak Out web resource bringing together a range of policy, support and learning resources for staff who may be experiencing or witnessing unacceptable behaviour at work;
• Participating in the Stepping Up initiative, a positive action programme aimed at improving the representation of BAME people, as well as other groups, in senior leadership roles within Bristol and the wider region;
• Launching an apprenticeship talent pipeline to drive ethnic diversity whilst taking into consideration the skills gaps present in underrepresented groups in industry demand areas such as Finance, IT, Human Resources, Engineering and the Creative Industries;
• Publishing the results of our first Ethnicity Pay Gap Report and taking action to address any inequalities;
• Introducing positive action measures and training in unconscious bias with a specific focus on recruitment and promotion of staff;
• Funding research internships which provide paid experience in research for new graduates, in order to increase the number of BAME students progressing to postgraduate study;
• Setting an ambitious target to eliminate the BAME awards gap at the university by 2025 and developed a comprehensive action plan to address this, informed by research we have commissioned from Bristol SU;
• Beginning the work of decolonising our curricula, led by academic colleagues with expertise in this area;
• Providing staff training in race equality; harassment and hate crime awareness training delivered by SARI; and intercultural awareness training delivered by Kynfolk;
• Providing access to specialist counselling services for our BAME students and staff from Nilaari;
• Establishing a web-based resource drawn from research published by University of Bristol researchers around race, racism and anti-racism;
• Sponsoring the East Bristol Into University Centre which serves an area of the city with a high BAME population;
• Supporting city-based projects such as CARGO (Charting African Resilience Generating Opportunities) and Iconic Black Britons.

Leading the case for legislative change

A key focus for members of the Steering Group will be a review of our recruitment practices. The senior leadership team is committed to increasing the racial diversity of the University’s workforce across all levels of our institution and we have initiated a range of action to support progress in this space over the years.

However, we recognise that after almost ten years of working within the constraints and uncertainty of the positive action measures included in the Equality Act 2010, more directive action is needed.

We believe that a tension exists within the existing legislation between direct discrimination and positive action measures. This tension has restricted efforts to improve the representation of Black, Asian and minority ethnic staff across our organisations, our city and across the wider UK.

To that end, alongside several other local organisations and community groups, we are formally requesting that the government introduce an amendment to existing provisions in the Equality Act relating to direct discrimination.

This amendment aims to enable specific ethnic groups to be treated more favourably in employment that other ethnicities where we reasonably think that the specific ethnic group experiences disadvantage. It would also provide clarity and reassurance to employers in terms of what is and is not permissible by law to improve representation of specific ethnic groups in all levels of employment where they are currently under-represented.

Ultimately, an amendment of this kind would support all employers to take a flexible, evidence-based and focused approach that would actively seek to level the playing field and minimise barriers to employment experienced by different ethnic groups.

You can read more about the campaign in this Bristol 24/4 article which features our employability and opportunity manager, Rebecca Scott.

Next steps

I’m proud that out University is leading the way on this campaign and we hope to garner widespread support for our proposed changes. However, we recognise that parliamentary action can take time and success is not guaranteed. In the meantime, we will continue to develop a targeted and segmented approach to positive action measures with the view to develop their efficacy and impact across our community.

We must eradicate racial discrimination in all its forms from our University and ensure the experience of studying and working here is positive and welcoming for everyone, of all ethnic and racial backgrounds. We aim to be bold and far reaching in our action, as I hope the above example demonstrates.

There is still much work to do, but I look forward to updating you on further progress in the coming months.

 

Reading the national press, you might think that universities had just performed the last rites over centuries of in-person and on-campus teaching.

The argument being peddled by journalists whose experience of lectures was clearly more inspirational than mine, is somewhat simplistic and misleading. It suggests that a curriculum without live lectures equates to the end of all in-person teaching, as if practicals, laboratories, seminars, and tutorials do not count. Headline catching it may be; true it is not.

There are good arguments why universities are putting lectures online. Any university which has a vague interest in keeping the R rate down and being public health spirited would not wish to cram 400 students into a large airless lecture mimicking a static version of the Diamond Princess, but with younger passengers.

Kill the sacred lecture cow

But the naivety of the journalists’ critique is not about public health, it’s about what counts as higher education, and the totemic status of lectures. Anyone who has worked within an inch of higher education in the last 10 to 15 years will know that attendance at live lectures has dwindled dramatically since the installation of lecture capture which records the dulcet or droning tones of a lecture.

Students vote with their feet, and when there is no value added of engagement, interaction or inspiration, they prefer to flick open their laptops and watch the lecture at a speed and time that suits them, fast-forwarding when they are bored, and replaying when they need to rehearse the material to grasp a tricky concept.

Long before the dawn of lecture capture, Graham Gibbs wrote a swingeing critique of this most venerated of teaching genres, entitled “Twenty terrible reasons for lecturing”. His argument, in a nutshell, was that students learn very little from most of their lectures. This argument has been borne out by Astin’s research in the USA, which demonstrated that student involvement and “close contact” with lecturers and other students was the stuff of learning in higher education.

Until the virus struck, online education was largely the preserve of the Open University. No other university would have chosen to offer online education as the way to sustain some or all of its provision.

Here and there, various universities had made forays into the digital, without allowing it to affect the primacy of traditional teaching approaches. Most older universities persisted with the convention of sepia-toned lectures in the rarefied atmosphere of wood-panelled rooms; some, both old and new, stretched the convention into funky new buildings which hinted at digital futures.

In yesterday’s world, groups of students trudged up hills and crowded in corridors holding laptops in one hand, lattes in the other. They listened, took notes (or not), made halting attempts to participate, even venturing one or two questions in the lecture halls, while others, more confident, dominated conversations in seminars.

Many endured a long silence: listening, waiting, and watching. In applied subjects, students often made a more vibrant entry into disciplinary conversations, whether through building model bridges in civil engineering, or rehearsing a performance of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. For most, conversations occurred in halls or houses of multiple occupancy, or through clubs and societies and at social gatherings.

Normal was the problem

This was higher education in the UK as we knew it before the new normal. We will all have some nostalgia for the way things were. But as many commentators have argued – “we cannot return to normal, because normal was the problem.”

Don’t get me wrong here – in person teaching is clearly a brilliant way of teaching, with all its nuance, spontaneity, sense-checking, embodiment and thrill of performance. Students in face to face contexts may enjoy an expansive experience of chatting on the way to class, in the library and laboratory, and in various hang outs, where so many deep conversations take place. This shapes who students are and who they become.

But I’m not sure universities had grasped the full potential of face to face education before the shutters came down on 23 March. Certainly, many lectures were patchily attended and caught in a strange time-warp.

Online education is showing me and my colleagues some fantastic things that we can do so much better and will, I hope, shape our practice as teachers in higher education forever. At the University of Bristol, we are running a series of digital design courses, and we have about 50 digital champions in schools working with the central Bristol Institute for Learning and Teaching.

Today I was in a session with nearly 200 academics, and they were reflecting on their “Aha!” moments about online education from the emergency online pivot. Among this sample, some green shoots are poking through the rough ground which point to the potential of the digital to do some distinctive things. The list is not exhaustive but online education seems to:

• personalise learning, with students working at their own pace and thoughtfully going back to material in their own time
• trigger a shift from content-driven curricula (the idea of ‘covering content’) to carefully structured and selective bite-sized lectures with engaging tasks which help students get to grips with concepts
• draw out different voices and invite questions from students who do not routinely contribute to discussion in face to face sessions – when done well, it seems to be more inclusive
• prompt student engagement, agency and autonomy
• take the focus off assessment and enable more learning through carefully designed tasks
• promote participation, writing, and an enduring kind of community.

This all may sound a bit utopian in our decidedly dystopian world, but I want to make a case for shifting the narrative about online education from a deficit one.

It’s different from in-person education, and it struggles to replicate practice-based activities, and the human interactions you need to develop the skills to become a dentist, for example. But we need to find ways to ensure that we see some advantages to this different (albeit unchosen) mode of education and garner the benefits of its particular world of possibilities. From my interactions with colleagues, the most striking possibility is that the conversation has crept from the corridors and into the classroom, and that may be a very rich thing indeed.

As we set our faces to an uncertain and hybrid educational future in September, the community of academics at the University of Bristol is proud of its efforts at online education, and excited at the fresh educational winds blowing in our direction.

It won’t be easy; it won’t be cheap; but our online education won’t be a paltry imitation of old and tired genres like the lecture. And we are saving the best kinds of interaction which enable students to learn the most, for on campus teaching in small groups and in laboratories, on a scale that Covid-19 will allow, and in ways that our scientific invention might enable.

The reality of racism was brought into sharp and disturbing focus last week as we saw how for some people Black lives simply do not matter. Sadly, the death of George Floyd in the United States is not a one-off occurrence and Black communities across the globe face racism, violence, and discrimination on an everyday basis.

We stand in solidarity with our Black staff and students against all forms of racism and social injustice.  At times like these, it is all too easy to look to people of colour to educate those around them, adding to the pressure and trauma that many are already experiencing during this time.

We recognise that it is not the responsibility of our Black colleagues and students to convince us why we need to tackle societal, structural, and institutional racism. It is the responsibility of us all to eradicate racism. We will continue to challenge this through our research, our education, and our civic engagements.  Our University with its critical role in education and shaping social policy, must be at the forefront of the continuing struggle against prejudice and inequity based on race.

We recognise that, as a University, we still have our own issues, and we are working hard to address these. Many of our Black students and staff feel isolation and discomfort as they experience daily microaggressions across campus.  We encourage students and staff to report any incident of racial harassment and seek support from us.  There is no place for racism at our University.

As the global coronavirus pandemic continues, we are also aware of evidence that Black people, as well as Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) people, are at disproportionately higher risk of illness, death, and bereavement.  We are conscious that this places additional stress and burden on our community. We offer wellbeing and mental health support to all our staff and students including those affected by racism:

• Nilaari telephone counselling – this service is prioritising members of the BAME community who have recently lost a loved one (0117 952 5742; clare@nilaari.co.uk)
• Student Wellbeing Service
• Student support services
• Multifaith Chaplaincy
• Staff Mental Health and Wellbeing Support
• Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Staff Network
• Report and Support
• Samaritans phoneline which is open and free 24/7 (116 123; jo@samaritans.org) or use their app

To find out more about our activities to support our institutional commitment to race equality please see our Institutional Statement on Race Equality