How will the new academic structures improve administrative support?
Many of our smaller Schools are too small for cost-effective support by locally-placed administrative staff and are beset by the burdens of the administrative duties that have to be performed by their academic staff. For example, smaller Schools need to put in the same (if not greater) marketing effort to attract an intake of 20 students as they would for an intake of 300. And, while other bureaucratic demands made upon them (e.g., in monitoring teaching quality, finance, HR) may not be much less than in a larger department, their resources to expend on employing administrative staff will be far less. Problems like these are dealt with most effectively by grouping Schools together into academically coherent Colleges with the wherewithal to employ highly professional administrative staff to carry out administrative tasks presently carried out by academics.
Many of our smaller Schools are too small for cost-effective support by locally-placed administrative staff and are beset by the burdens of the administrative duties that have to be performed by their academic staff. For example, smaller Schools need to put in the same (if not greater) marketing effort to attract an intake of 20 students as they would for an intake of 300. And, while other bureaucratic demands made upon them (e.g., in monitoring teaching quality, finance, HR) may not be much less than in a larger department, their resources to expend on employing administrative staff will be far less. Problems like these are dealt with most effectively by grouping Schools together into academically coherent Colleges with the wherewithal to employ highly professional administrative staff to carry out administrative tasks presently carried out by academics. This will have the twin benefits of freeing the latter to pursue their central role, which is to research and teach, and of increasi
