Data and the Swansea Degree

At the end of last week I was approached to be part of a survey on the way in which data security and freedom of information were taught within the various degree programmes at Swansea. I am not sure whether I was able to give the right answers, it was…

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Going for Gold, the Latest News from TEF

There has been a flurry of activity over the last couple of weeks around TEF and I thought that it would be useful just to bring you up to date and say something about the possible implications for Swansea. The members of the TEF Panel were announced a couple of…

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Thinking Inclusivity

There has been a great deal of news in the last week or so around TEF, the Diamond Report and other related matters. I will aim to provide a summary of developments next week, when the dust has settled a little. For this week I want to talk about something…

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TEF 2 Progress

By now I expect that you will have heard of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) and how it will impact the University. Previously Phil Brophy provided an excellent blog that summarises what TEF is and what it means for the university (Phil Brophy’s Blog), so I’ll not repeat anything here…

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NSS, Go Beyond and STEP4Excellence

This week was the first time in my life that I have been compared to Woody from Toy Story. Those who were at the Go Beyond event on Monday will know who was likened to Buzz Lightyear, the rest of you will have to guess. In the first two days…

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News from TEF: Leadership and Learning Gain

In the last couple of weeks there have been a couple of news stories that have concerned the development of TEF. The most obvious is the announcement of Chris Husbands as the first Chair of the TEF panel. The other was the announcement that HEFCE has commissioned the University of…

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Clearing and Beyond

It has been an incredibly busy ten days or so for many, many people across the University, but we have now reached our threshold numbers for home and EU undergraduate numbers. Both I, and the rest of the Senior Management Team, would therefore like to thank everybody involved for all…

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Reflecting on Excellence

As I listened to the news earlier this week one of the headlines was quoting Jo Johnson as saying that Universities must wipe out mediocre teaching and drive up student engagement. The less well informed media claimed that he had laid out new plans to cut the fees of universities that…

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Response to NSS 2016

The NSS data is released today and it is clear that Swansea has not done as well as it did last year. I think we can still be very pleased with an overall satisfaction score of 90% but there are clearly issues in other parts of the survey that we…

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