Episode 27: Convening power, planning for the long term and growing future HE leaders

The latest edition of University Registrars Talking About Stuff sees me chatting to Lee Sanders, Registrar and Secretary at the University of Birmingham

Lee talks about his all-encompassing role across professional services at Birmingham as well as in relation to governance and as a member of the university executive. Drawing on experiences from both Durham and Warwick (where Lee and I worked together for a period) he  observes that things have changed considerably since our time at Warwick and we have all had to adapt to what is now a very different operating environment for universities.

Lee comments on the convening power of a registrar and notes the value of this in the context of responding to the pandemic over the past year. He also reflects on the importance of partnerships in the response, including partnerships with students, between academics and professional services staff, and across professional services too. Other features of the pandemic response he highlights are communicating with confidence, not over-complicating things and enlisting the support of the expert academic community, from establishing testing facilities to forming advisory groups.

We also talk about the importance of the longer term and thinking to the future including the blended learning experience, changes to working practices from agile working to changed operational processes and different uses of space on campus.

Finally we discuss the value of the generalist administrative experience and the benefits of graduate training schemes including Birmingham' own scheme which has been running in parallel to the national Ambitious Futures programme. Lee and I firmly agree on the importance of addressing the future leadership needs of sector via such schemes as well as recruiting talented administrators who have also made a great contribution to the recovery effort.