Covid-19: Towards a Sustainable Recovery for Warwick

Hear from Stuart Croft, Vice-Chancellor, with an update on how Warwick is creating a platform for recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Dear colleagues,

I wrote to you earlier today to respond to the Prime Minister's statement this weekend regarding the lifting of some lockdown restrictions. I’m now writing with a view of our financial situation. Many of you will have seen media coverage about the significant financial challenges that UK universities are facing as a direct result of the Covid-19 pandemic. I wanted to write to you to explain more about how we will be affected at Warwick. More importantly, I am keen you hear from me directly what we plan to do about it to create a platform for recovery and I want to stress that protecting jobs remains critical.

Students across the globe are now less likely to consider studying abroad this coming academic year. The pandemic also threatens to distort our domestic student market, and it will clearly also significantly impact our research, commercial and other income. All of this will challenge the institutional stability of UK universities for many months, and even years, ahead.

At Warwick, our financial forecasts must adjust to a significant reduction to our income this year and to a more challenging situation for the immediate years ahead. We need to take immediate and concerted action to severely limit expenditure in 2019/20, and we need to look to make significant savings of £50m in 2020/21.

I know this will raise concerns not just amongst you, but also among our many local and national partners. We are a major employer and make a significant contribution to the local economy. We cannot underestimate the role we play both socially and economically. National recovery will require a strong and engaged university sector working with regional as well as national partners.

Despite this unprecedented context however, with your collective support, we can and will emerge stronger.

We have developed a recovery plan based on five principles and discussed this with Heads of Department today. Delivery of our Strategy will continue – with our ongoing commitment to Education and Research, but we will pause the implementation on some areas to allow us to focus on the stabilisation which is essential.

Clearly we need still to protect health, but we need also to think together how we can live and work on campus in an age of continued social distancing. We will soon have graduated our students, so the next phase is going to be about recruiting, welcoming and inducting our new students. We want to protect jobs, but in the next phase the best way of doing that is to save cash wherever we can. We have seen a wonderful commitment to our communities and need to continue to find ways of supporting still further our contribution to our region; and we have already seen the role our academics can play globally, nationally and locally in a strategic recovery programme.

These are our key principles for recovery:

Continue to provide an outstanding learning and teaching experience in order to attract the best students

To lead, influence and bring about positive transformation in the world by maintaining and accelerating our world-leading disciplinary and interdisciplinary research

To ensure the safety, health and wellbeing of our community during the ongoing global Covid-19 crisis

To play a leadership role in the economic, social, cultural and health recovery of our region

To ensure the long term financial sustainability of the university

We will be sharing a video from today's Heads of Department briefing session with you later this week with more detailed information. Heads of Department will now work with you to agree how you can support the recovery programme as individuals and as teams.

We have to reshape the way we work this year to deliver our five principles alongside our core purposes of Education and Research. We need your help to do this; to put the right framework in place for a successful and sustainable recovery.

Your commitment so far has been immense. I am grateful to everyone in our community. This has called for an extraordinary collective effort and in circumstances where we have all had to adapt to radically new ways of thinking, working and acting. Thank you, and let’s start to build a platform together for our recovery.

Professor Stuart Croft

Vice Chancellor and President

Monday 11 May 2020