"Welcome to Lockdown Diaries episode five.

Last week I put out an appeal, really for those colleagues who are on furlough to get in touch and thank you loads of people have. I am really grateful to you because I know a lot of you have received notification about extensions to furlough and it's affected people I know in lots of different ways.

So thank you to Lisa who got in touch with the most brilliant idea - apparently you can get people who run coffee vans to come to your street and deliver coffee which you buy in a social distance kind of way, which is a fantastic idea. There has been brilliant stuff people are doing on furlough, Kevin was in touch to tell me about the shopping he has been doing for neighbours and other things of that sort. But I was really struck by a message from Emily who said "I don't really know if I should be in contact because obviously on furlough, I'm not supposed to work" - and that's really important, if you're on furlough scheme rules are you're not supposed to work but please keep in touch. If you use your email to keep in touch, that's fine - it's not work. It's about staying in touch, understanding what's going on. Keep looking at our website, keep those things that help you stay engaged with what we're doing and where we're going, really, really important. Everyone on furlough is a member of staff, a member of our community, so please stay connected.

I've also had a fantastic range of pictures and images and things this week as well. Paul who has been writing every week, thanks Paul, in Sussex has an amazing set of pictures down there when it was beautiful and really attractive and people have sent me lots of images of their 2.6 challenge performances and my word - people dressed up in quite extraordinary ways. But clearly lots of you have been doing amazing stuff to raise money for charity. Incredibly important at the moment as we know lots and lots of charities around the country are really struggling for funds to keep going.

And I mentioned Denise last week who sent some pictures of a street party and how people are doing this, and then she said to me "we do this kind of performance of 'I Want to Break Free' with the hoovers, the dancing outside" - and that was one of those moments I thought now, am I being wound up? But no, there was in fact photographic evidence so people were doing pretty amazing things to keep going.

And I've seen some other things you have been doing to keep time going as well. Jason, virtual pizza making - amazing. Everyone making pizza, virtually at the same time, not for me. And then quizzes, so Dan in WBS talking about the quiz you got there and James from CTU, with a great taste of how in a few seconds can you create some kind of PPE - some terrible examples of PPE I saw there as well. And one other shout-out, I hope I get this right, Steve who works for the Grid in Leamington has just completed an album, a new song, I hope I get this right Steve, It's space rock? Did I get that right? No doubt I got that terribly wrong, you'll tell me and I'll correct myself next week.

Now one of the other things you have been doing this week in terms of being in contact with me is telling me that a lot of people are worried about the future. And I can completely understand that, this lockdown does feel quite heavy on a lot of people at the moment, I know it certainly does on me - it's not because the weather has changed, it's just the period it's going on and various organisations have put out quite scary things about the future. For example, it's been said that education is going to be the most seriously impacted sector in the future. UCU have put out their survey saying that the sector will be missing about £2.5 billion in income next year. Other universities have been putting out numbers about how they think their budget will work. And I just want to say a word about where we are, what we're doing and how we're doing things because I think it's important at this stage. Obviously we're looking and thinking about what this future might look like but there are three really, really important developments that we just need to wait for whilst we're working and thinking - we just need to wait to see three things:

• The first is government might be giving us some real support around research funding - we need to understand what that might be, understand what kind of money will be involved and understand what kind of conditions. That's the first thing.
• The second thing we need to understand is, how is this lockdown doing to end? And what does the new normal look like? Because I think it's clear to all of us now that when the lockdown has 'officially ended', we're still going to have lots of social distancing. So we need to understand what those social distancing and other restrictions are and how we can open campus in context of that and how we can start the new academic year in the context of that. It's all manageable once we know what the restrictions and constraints we got to work with.
• And the third thing that's really important for us to understand is, so what is the national economic recovery plan? Can't really see that at the moment, but clearly there's going to be a recovery plan, because if there isn't a recovery plan, there isn't going to be a national economy - and clearly there's going to be a national economy. And we need to know what that is, not just for our colleagues who work in Warwick Conferences, and elsewhere in CCSG and so on... we need to know that because of course, our business partners for the University as a whole in education as well as research and we need to know what our region is going to look like and how we can support our region in this period going forward.

So please, we haven't said anything about this at the moment, don't think that we're not thinking about planning and how we're going to work our way through the course of the next financial year, we are - but waiting for greater clarity of those three points. We're working with lots of partner universities about this and also partner organisations, local enterprise partnership I'm talking to quite regularly at the moment about this. And I expect in the course of the next week or so, we'll be able to say a bit more about how we're planning to move forward. But however we do this, it will be on the basis of sets of principles that how we, as a University stay together as a University, work through the challenges we are going to face and make sure we're in a much, much better place for the recovery when it comes.

So thank you, more from me next week - we will probably by that stage know what the next phase of what lockdown is - in the meantime, look after yourselves, look after each other.

Best wishes to you all, speak again next week.

Thanks."

Vice-Chancellor, Professor Stuart Croft