Report of Discussion

Tuesday, 5 November 2024

A Discussion was convened by videoconference. Deputy Vice-Chancellor Dr Michael Rands, DAR, was presiding, with the Registrary’s deputy, the Junior Proctor, the Senior Pro‑Proctor and sixteen other persons present.
 

Twenty-ninth Report of the Board of Scrutiny, dated 8 October 2024

(Reporter, 6756, 2024–25, p. 65).

Dr R. V. L. Doubleday (Centre for Science and Policy, Christ’s College and out-going Chair of the Board of Scrutiny):

Deputy Vice-Chancellor, as out‑going Chair of the Board of Scrutiny I’m pleased to introduce the Board’s Twenty‑ninth annual report to the Regent House.

The Board of Scrutiny was established to provide independent oversight of the workings of Council and the University’s leadership. The opportunity to question senior officers and follow lines of inquiry on behalf of the Regent House is a privilege. During the course of the year, I was repeatedly struck by our University’s vitality. There’s no doubt that this stems from the excellence and dedication of the people that work here – and the still strong sense of collegiality.

Having said that, the University faces tough challenges – not least from increasing financial pressures, regulatory demands, technological changes and societal expectations. And as the administration of the University grows in response to these challenges, our established ways of working are coming under pressure. Our culture of ‘bottom up’ priority setting and decision making by committee needs to be constantly reviewed and adapted.

My sense is that the University recognises this and is in the process of responding. For example, as set out in our Report, the Board has welcomed recent progress on the People Strategy, Teaching Review and on Environmental Sustainability.

However, the role of the Board is to scrutinise, and the Report highlights that more needs to be done to improve our collective capacity to make difficult decisions, stick to those decisions and focus on their efficient implementation.

In our Twenty‑ninth Report, we focused on the importance of including financial considerations in planning and decision-making. The Board welcomed efforts to increase the quality of financial information through Enhanced Financial Transparency; and the budgetary discipline imposed by the announcement of 5% cuts over the next two years. And I welcome plans to consolidate the University’s financial management by combining the offices of Chief Financial Officer and Director of Finance to provide leadership during the delivery of the Finance Transformation Programme.

Alongside the Finance Transformation Programme, the University has also been running transformation programmes in research services, HR and estates. For the past several years the Board has been concerned that the University may have bitten off more than it could chew, and has called for greater prioritisation, sequencing and overall operational grip.

The Board has welcomed the sense that this view is now widely shared and that there is a greater recognition of the importance of effective operational delivery. For example, by reducing duplication of roles and responsibilities between the centre, Schools, and Faculties and Departments.

Finally, I would like to thank the Vice-Chancellor and the Registrary and all the other officers who gave their time to take part in the Board’s discussion. I would also like to thank my fellow Board members. And finally, on behalf of the Board of Scrutiny as a whole, I would like to thank the Regent House for its engagement. I’d like to encourage members to continue to engage with the democratic self-governance of this University.

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Mr R. J. Hopwood (Murray Edwards College and current Chair of the Board of Scrutiny):

Deputy Vice-Chancellor, I was a member of and secretary to the Board of Scrutiny last year and as such a contributor to its Twenty‑ninth Report. This year I chair the Board of Scrutiny.

It struck me that the Vice-Chancellor’s commendable address found particular resonance with many of the issues raised in the Board of Scrutiny’s Twenty‑ninth Report, and I wanted to echo and highlight one or two.

Firstly, I should note that the spirit in which the Board makes its Report is entirely positive. The University deserves its world-class reputation. Contributing some £30 bn to the UK economy is no mean feat and does not happen by accident. And that makes it even more important to be vigilant to the possibility of strategic drift or even decline, the onset of which, as the Vice-Chancellor noted, may be difficult to spot.

The Board found a few potential signs of this. There were worsening finances, the reasons for which, we were told, may not be fully or properly understood; worries about the coordination and expensive delivery of major projects; burgeoning administrative costs; an unwieldy, often ineffective Estate, and governance structures where more seemed somehow to deliver less.

It is undoubtedly true that the regulatory framework and funding for the HE sector have tightened in recent times. That and inflation have brought significant pressures. So, while the Board is keen to note that the overall financial position of the University remains sound, getting a firmer grip of operations and finances is, in its view, required to allow the University to make better, more agile choices, to meet the right, longer-term priorities and avoid waste. If it prevaricates or does not do so, inevitable consequences will follow.

In some ways, the Board felt the University was at an inflection point. Investment is indeed needed in a number of areas, in the right people, in the right buildings and in the right structures. This is needed to retain the University’s justified position as a world-leading university.

‘Salami slicing’, or ‘unstrategic’ financial planning, as the Report notes, often leads to an ineffectual, short-term solution to a real problem, especially where structural deficits are concerned. Everyone appreciates that making decisions to discontinue or reform activity to free up resources for investment in the right priorities is never easy – but for organisations that deserve and wish to retain their global pre-eminence, it can be vital.

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Mr G. P. Allen (Wolfson College and former Chair of the Board of Scrutiny):

Deputy Vice-Chancellor, my comments concern paragraphs 52–62 of the Board’s Report, which set out substantial projected deficits of the order of £45m–£60m over three years (2023–26) for the ‘Academic University’ and, more worryingly, the inability of the central offices to provide the Board (paragraph 59) with satisfactory explanations for the origins of these deficits. The Report also refers in paragraph 53 to the development since 2018 of Enhanced Financial Transparency (EFT) as: a means of ‘providing reliable and transparent financial information so that institutions can make better informed decisions and plan and budget in generally accepted and efficient ways’; and of ‘attributing income where earned, with costs aligned to those income streams ... and indirect costs...’

Starting in the 1990s with what was originally known as the Disaggregation Analysis, then became the Resource Allocation Model (RAM), and supplemented by input from external consultants, the central bodies have had information for many years of the attributable income streams and costs and accordingly of which areas of the University were in surplus and those which were in deficit. The winners and losers of course fluctuated over time and the Resource Management Committee wisely resolved merely to ‘have regard’ to an institution’s place in the RAM when considering the allocation of resources and not mechanically to follow the RAM.

It is hard to believe that it has taken the tenures of a Pro‑Vice-Chancellor, Director of Finance, and Chief Financial Officer to develop the data in pursuit of the holy grail of EFT and meanwhile putting off the time for hard decisions about resource allocation and stopping spending; however in its Notice of 23 September 2024,1 announcing the forthcoming departures of the latter officers, the Council passed the baton of EFT within the Finance Transformation Programme to their successor. The Vice‑Chancellor, as Chair of the Planning and Resources Committee, is to be commended for initiating a 5% cut in Chest allocations to arrest the growing deficits. As the Board’s Report makes admirably clear in paragraph 65, EFT may offer better information, but it will not generate income and ‘it will not produce better decision-making unless that information is acted upon’. I hope the Council will take the recommendation in paragraph 62 seriously, set a firm timetable for reducing the annual deficits with or without EFT, and not simply kick the can down the road to the next generation of senior financial managers.

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Professor G. R. Evans (Emeritus Professor of Medieval Theology and Intellectual History), received by the Proctors:

Deputy Vice-Chancellor, there is a significant omission from this Report. Among the duties of the Board of Scrutiny are to take a close look at the Council’s activities and to report on them to the University. The Board of Scrutiny’s members include the Proctors, who are also expected to be present at Council meetings. At the Council’s meeting on 15 July the Vice-Chancellor proposed three new rules to manage ‘how the confidentiality of business’ is to be ‘handled on the Council’, limiting what its members may discuss outside its meetings and with whom.1 The Council approved these rules. Why? The Council’s Standing Orders already limit the confidentiality of reserved business almost entirely to the naming of names ‘relating to the employment or promotion of individuals by the University’ and ‘the admission and academic assessment of individuals’.‘The expectation is that as little business as possible will be reserved’. The Freedom of Information Act legislation protects from disclosure at s. 36 information which may ‘prejudice’ the ‘effective conduct of public affairs’, but where should that restriction be set in the context of frankness with the University’s governing body, the Regent House? A mention of Council’s three intended changes would have been welcome, since they have not been put to the Regent House.

The Report is chiefly concerned with problems in the ‘operation’ of the University’s ‘silos’. The Board suggests there are ‘too many’, resulting in ‘duplication of roles and responsibilities at the centre, Schools and Faculties/Departments’, with ‘not enough co‑ordination’ among them. It points to resulting ‘siloed thinking’. There are silos within silos. The Board sees a need to improve ‘operation’ not only between A and B but between every pair and cluster seeking to work cooperatively amongst all these entities.

In one of the three broad areas it has chosen, the Board has duly ‘reviewed a broad range of areas related to the provision of education and education services in the University this year, with a specific focus on the relationship between the University and the Colleges’. To ‘improve’ that the governing bodies of the University and the Colleges would all have to work together and the Privy Council could find itself very busy approving changes of their statutes. There is, however, some room for manoeuvre in practice. As an example, the University has ‘allocated postgraduate applications to colleges on the basis of a target ratio of PhDs:MPhils and automatically cut off Colleges at 30% of their minimum wish for PhD students, until all colleges had reached this level’.2

The Board’s first Recommendation concerns the Teaching Review. This has two purposes: to tackle the concerns about supervisions which were prominent in the last academic year and ‘also investigate the greater potential for joint appointments, especially supporting Colleges that struggle to recruit teaching fellows’.

Some operational cooperation is in evidence in connection with the first. A Joint statement3 by Justice4CollegeSupervisors4 and the Colleges, University and Office for Intercollegiate Services appeared in April reporting the findings of the Undergraduate Supervisor Workload Survey.5 The controversy over the Colleges’ role in appointing supervisors has ‘exposed’, says the Board, ‘some of the siloed thinking in the University that saw the provision of supervisions as simply a College matter’.

On the second, the Report expresses concerns about the lack of a developed system of conjoint appointments in Cambridge. Oxford’s system of conjoint appointments is long established, with academic vacancies advertised on behalf of both the University and a named College (or stated alternative Colleges) sometimes ‘in association with’ or simply ‘and’. In Cambridge an academic may be employed both by the University and a College but not ‘conjointly’. Typically ‘Academic’ vacancies are advertised on behalf of a Faculty or Department. College Lectureships are advertised by the relevant College and tend to be fixed‑term and involve a required number of supervisions.

Cambridge’s University Teaching Officers (UTOs) must give at least thirty hours’ lectures a year under Special Ordinance C (ix) 5. The University preserves for these Officers (under Special Ordinance C (xi) 3), the requirement of the Oxford and Cambridge Act of 1877 s. 15 to promote the interests of the University in ‘education, religion, learning, and research’ (except for ‘religion’). UTOs are therefore free to choose to give more time to research than to teaching.

Though UTOs are not required to supervise, Colleges regard them as desirable additions to their Fellowships. There is a helpful guide to ‘the purpose of the UTO Scheme’ as designed to ‘enable all Colleges to operate effectively in the educational field by ensuring a reasonable distribution of University Teaching Officers (UTOs) amongst them’.6 Nevertheless since UTOs may choose not to belong to a College at all ‘operational’ reform faces quite a cliff to climb in making fundamental changes to the collaboration of University and Colleges over teaching.

The Board refers to the Annual Report of the Council for the academic year 2022–23, which ‘set out five main elements’ of an emerging ‘People Strategy’ to cover ‘recruitment and offer; career progression and retention; culture and institution; pay and benefits; and diversity and inclusion’. Minute 963 of the Council at its meeting of 15 July records that this strategy was intended to ‘ensure that the University could position itself as an employer of choice’ but it was commented that ‘it would be important that it was implemented consistently throughout the University’ and there were reservations about the ‘focus on talent management’.

The Board does not mention the role of the Careers Syndicate among whose responsibilities is ‘to establish and organize means of communication between members of the University who are seeking employment and employers’, therefore precisely to deal with the problem of the silos.7 However, under ‘People’ and the University’s ‘People Strategy’, it considers the ‘Career Pathways’. It welcomes the introduction of a Teaching and Scholarship Pathway8 and the plans to introduce more open-ended rather than fixed-term contracts for early-career researchers. Arrangements for transfer between Pathways was soon found to need a Grace.9 How much such ‘transfer’ is happening?

The Board is less than congratulatory about ‘HR processes’. It has ‘received concerns that the time taken to investigate and conclude staff complaints and grievance processes were unduly lengthy’. It notes that ‘the University is updating and streamlining its policy, with the aim to respond in a timely manner’. The procedure was amended as recently as May 2023, through a Joint Report of the Council and the General Board on changes to the University’s Dignity at Work Policy and Grievance Policy.10 Has that approved things?

The Board’s Report touches only lightly upon the continuing controversy about the Employer Justified Retirement Age, mentioning it briefly in connection with ‘the University’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI)’ agenda and the EJRA Review Group’s estimate of ‘additional salary costs if the retirement age was scrapped’. It is nevertheless a very live issue. A Topic of concern Discussion called on the Future of the EJRA was held on 8 October with the remarks made published in the Reporter of 16 October.11 Almost all the speakers called for reform or abolition of the EJRA.

This is not the only year in which the Board of Scrutiny has expressed concerns about the operation of the University’s governance, commenting that ‘the need to increase understanding between the central bodies and the Regent House is a hardy perennial’. This year its heading is ‘Governance needs more teeth’. It points out that ‘the University governance structure is designed so that the University is run by committee, rather than individuals’ and is critical that there is ‘insufficient challenge evidenced in the proceedings of University committees’. There has, it says, been too much ‘box-ticking’. ‘Effective committees need to be critical friends’ to those tasked with presenting proposals and implementing decisions.

The Board of Scrutiny is itself intent on being such a ‘critical friend’. In due course the Council will publish its comments on the Report. History suggests that its recommendations may need to be repeated before they are acted on. It is to be hoped that will not be necessary this time.

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Dr M. J. Rutter (Cavendish Laboratory and Queens’ College), received by the Proctors:

Deputy Vice-Chancellor, it is always pleasing to read the Board of Scrutiny’s Annual Report, and I commend its members for the work they do on behalf of us all to ensure that the University is well-governed and learns from its successes and mistakes. Yet again I find myself wishing that I had more time to prepare these remarks, so that I might respond better to the Board’s labours.

The Board expresses concern about the University’s financial position. At least at the University level the overall financial position is known. My experience is that, over the past couple of decades, the amount of financial information at Departmental and Research Group level which is internally circulated, let alone discussed, has declined. Committees therefore end up considering items with clear financial implications, but with little understanding of whether costs can be met from existing resources.

As one example, I am aware that many like to blame the deficit on the increase in numbers of support staff. It is undeniable that such numbers have increased, and that staff cost money. But should I not be confident that no new post would have been created unless full funding for it had been identified? Should I not also be confident that spending money on streamlining and automating processes would have been considered alongside spending money on increasing staff headcount? And should I not be confident that the costs of poor staff retention are considered when pay and conditions are set? The costs include extra time spent on recruitment, handovers and training, and a lack of institutional memory resulting in time and resources wasted in unnecessary mistakes and in re-inventing wheels.

Financial accountability and prudence do not seem to be institutionally ingrained at all levels in this University, so perhaps it is unsurprising that there is difficulty balancing the books.

In its previous Report the Board recommended that Council publish a timetable for certain Special issues of the Reporter. This was done, and the Board notes its gratitude. But the Council stated that the Officers Number, Part I would no longer be published, stating that ‘Regent House membership for University staff is no longer predicated, for the majority, on holding an office, so the main purpose of publishing that list has been removed’.

I do not see how the main purpose of the Officers Number was ever to do with Regent House membership. The Roll of the Regent House is published separately, and there is no proposal to cease doing so. Its publication is required by Statute A III 10. One would not consult the Officers Number to determine whether someone else was a member of Regent House; one would consult the Roll directly. Nor would one consult the Officers Number to determine whether one was an Officer oneself. One would consider one’s employment contract, or maybe whether one had signed ‘The Book’.

But there was, and is, a purpose to the Officers Number. For better or worse (opinions vary), the rights, responsibilities and employment conditions of Officers and non-Officers differ. The Statutes and Ordinances are full of references to Officers, by which holders of an Established Office is always meant. It is therefore useful for third parties to be able to determine who is, and who is not, an Officer. And, given that the University is a public body, it could well be argued that the list of those who enjoy (and suffer) the consequences of an Established Office should be a matter of clear public record, and perhaps of historical record too. We should not have to guess which of our colleagues fall under Statute C and Ordinance XI.

Publishing an edition of the Reporter, when so few paper copies are now produced, should not cost much money. The production of the Officers number should be highly automated, being little more than a query on central HR records, and some formatting which too could be mostly automatic. I would question whether the Board should express gratitude for the Council’s decision to cease publishing this number, and I wonder if the Council would reconsider, or, at the least, better justify, this change?

Finally, in the Recommendations of its 2022 Report, was written ‘the Board recommends that the Council sets out how it will ensure proper accountability of UIS to the Regent House’. In 2023, the Board’s response to the Council’s comments on this point was ‘the Board welcomes this, and will keep the issue under review’. This year’s Report does not mention the UIS. Is all going well, or does the subheading above paragraph 75, ‘governance needs more teeth’, apply?

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Dr W. J. Astle (MRC Biostatistics Unit), received by the Proctors:

Deputy Vice-Chancellor, the Board of Scrutiny ‘welcomes the introduction of a career path up to professor level for people in teaching-focused roles via the Academic (Teaching and Scholarship) Pathway and more open-ended rather than fixed-term contracts’.

In July the University extended the Academic (Teaching and Scholarship) career pathway to include clinical academics.1 Minutes dated 13 June 2024 record that the HR Committee ‘approved a proposal to create Clinical Academic (Teaching and Scholarship) offices and posts, including a new Academic (Teaching and Scholarship) office of Clinical Professor for established staff, and a post of Clinical Teaching Professor for unestablished staff’.2 In fact, there remains a single class of office of Clinical Professor in the University, although the duties of the holders of the office, which are ‘determined by the Faculty Board or other body concerned’, are no longer required to include either teaching or research.3

A glance at the Report of the General Board on the outcomes of the Academic Career Pathways (Research and Teaching) and (Teaching and Scholarship) 2024 exercises indicates that promotions in the Teaching and Scholarship Pathway are made overwhelmingly into unestablished posts.4 The open-ended employment contracts issued to those holding unestablished academic posts often include a ‘limited funding’ clause containing a warning that ‘if this funding ceases then your post may be at risk of redundancy’. The high bar for redundancy set by the Schedule to Statute C does not apply to academics who do not hold University offices.5 The Research Operations Office will not allow unestablished academics to apply for grants that might run beyond an end date given in a limited funding clause. (My own open-ended contract still contains a limited funding clause with an end date of 31 December 2023).

Recent disclosures by the University under the Freedom of Information Act, of papers relating to a ruling by the Vice‑Chancellor a quarter of a century ago, suggest that the creation of unestablished academic posts may be unlawful. By the 1990s, the General Board had begun to make appointments to unestablished academic posts on external funds. Several of these were described as ‘at the level of Professor or Reader’. They included, for example, a Northern Telecom Research Professorship of Photonics.6 In 1999, the General Board decided that some general policy was needed to regulate such appointments. On 12 May it published a Notice setting out a ‘Procedure for appointments to unestablished posts at the level of Professor or Reader’, which listed three routes to an appointment: the creation of a post due to the academic need of a Faculty, the creation of a post for a personal promotion and the creation of a post for a person in receipt of an external award.7

A request for a Discussion of the Notice as a Topic of concern to the University signed by ten members of the Regent House was received by the Registrary.8 In that Discussion, held on 26 October 1999, Dr (now Professor) A. W. F. Edwards explained that he had written to the Registrary:

I reminded him of the sentence in Statute D, XIV [now in Special Ordinance C (vii)] ‘No Professorship shall be established in the University except by Grace of the Regent House after publication of a Report of the General Board’, and I added my view that prefixing the words ‘Research’ or ‘Unestablished’ or any other word to ‘Professorship’ did not avoid the Statute.9

Professor Edwards subsequently made a representation to the then Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sir Alec Broers, for statutory review of the practice of making appointments to unestablished posts designated ‘Research Professorships’. On 21 March 2001, the General Board announced the outcome in a Notice on ‘Appointments to unestablished posts at the level of Professor and Reader’:

In December 1999, Dr (now Professor) A. W. F. Edwards made a formal representation to the Vice-Chancellor under Statute K, 5 that the General Board’s practice of making appointments to unestablished Research Professorships was in contravention of the University’s Statutes. A legal opinion on this representation was accordingly sought, which confirmed that the practice was ultra vires.10

That opinion has now been disclosed by the Information Compliance Office, together with a preliminary opinion on Professor Edwards’s representation from the University’s solicitor, Gary Attle. He advised that the University cannot evade the statutory regulation of academic posts simply by labelling a post ‘unestablished’:

Unless we are instructed otherwise, it seems to be the case that a post is treated as unestablished (and outside the Statutes) if it is called unestablished and not created/established under the Statutes. We believe that this is a circular argument and likely to be regarded as an impermissible way of avoiding the Statutes in respect of Professorships.11

Counsel, Robert Jay, QC, agreed:

There is no category of ‘unestablished professor’: the phrase is, I regret to say, a contradiction in terms and the justification for the putative category entails dangerous circularity.12

It seems quite likely that analogous arguments hold for the categories of University office other than Professor.

Although the ruling arising from Professor Edwards’s representation is still in force, it is tacitly ignored. The University now employs over 300 staff in unestablished academic posts, almost 1 in 6 of its academics. Unestablished posts with the title ‘Teaching Professor’ have been created, directly contrary to the ruling of Sir Alec Broers in 2000. The review of researcher reward and progression arrangements is likely to lead to a Report proposing the reintroduction of the use of the title ‘Research Professor’ for unestablished posts, the practice that was previously ruled ultra vires.13

In its Twenty-seventh Report, the Board of Scrutiny noted that it awaited justification from the HR Committee of the practice of making appointments in the Teaching and Scholarship pathway to academic posts that are unestablished:

In response to remarks made in the Discussion, the Council observed that ‘there may be good reasons of business efficiency’ for needing on occasion to appoint to unestablished academic Teaching and Scholarship roles. The Board awaits the HR Committee’s explanation of what such business reasons might be.14

Did that explanation ever arrive?

Following the Board’s Twenty-seventh Report the Council agreed to a review of the increase in the use of unestablished posts in the University, a review which has been repeatedly postponed.15 Meanwhile the practice of making unestablished academic appointments continues systematically, at the expense of academic freedom and of the quality of the University’s teaching and research. Consequently, I have a made a representation to the Vice‑Chancellor for review under Statute A IX 1.

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Mr R. S. Haynes (University Information Services), received by the Proctors:

Deputy Vice-Chancellor, I am a Senior University Computer Officer based in the University’s Information Services, a long-standing UCU1 member and Union Learning Representative.

I want to add to the thanks to the Board of Scrutiny for its clarifying report and the ongoing vital role it plays in the operation of the University.

I would like to briefly highlight a few points which are in support of this vital scrutiny.

It is heartening to read the focus of concern on siloed thinking and actions, which push apart the natural collaborative harmony which distinguishes the University at its best. A more strategic, participatory, and joined-up approach serves as a community-building enabler, an antidote to an overly hierarchical approach, in line with our vision and mission.

The concern about effective governance needing more teeth, along with critical friends, raises a common concern that reporting and the sharing of the minutes from various committees is too often significantly delayed and frequently outdated (e.g. on https://www.governance.cam.ac.uk), making it difficult to impossible for members of the University to engage and helpfully comment on the proceedings, or contribute to the topics planned for future Discussions, or keep track of plans, decisions, and road maps meant for meaningful development. Perhaps we can review improvements to sharing some of the key details, to foster greater participation and understanding of the governance processes and intended outcomes in our community.

It was good to see supportive comments about the Justice4CollegeSupervisors2 campaign, both as the kind of critical friend commended in the Report, and its impact in helping to review and improve provision of teaching.

Curiously, the mentions of the EJRA reveal in part the continuing need for critical reviews and further resolution. The concern that ‘For good governance, the costs and benefits of all proposals should be clearly spelled out to the Regent House’ (Section 80) seems too quickly to presume that a report such as from the Review Group is sufficient in providing an estimate of costs, although overall its statistical data and methods have been challenged by the critically friendly and rigorous rebuttal of the report and its conclusions: (1) ‘Is the EJRA proportionate and therefore justified? A critical review of the EJRA policy at Cambridge’ – (paper)3 and (2) The Penty Report: Flaws (summary)4.

In the recent Topic of concern5 the Council was asked for a report to clarify pressing and still outstanding questions on the updated EJRA, including the full case for objective justification, which as the Board points out should naturally include full costing details and the overall impact on the University Community. We await the Council’s response.

In terms of staff recruitment and retention, and the recent People Strategy, as a brief matter of concern, while commendable that there are Academic Career Pathways, we have yet to develop such career pathways for all staff, particularly ones combining continuing professional development (CPD) coupled with career progression. This is not only logical and possible, but especially so for an educational institution. The unions stand ready to further engage in helping to bring this together, as a community, and hopefully we will see more progress on this as part of developing together the People Strategy.