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During our departmental staff meeting on Monday 20th April 2020, we discussed the accountability structure for our department. A video of the meeting can be found here (password: 7R=.%+5+). The presentation can be found here and is broken down below with additional notes from the presentation.

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Roland started as Head of Department in October 2019. This came with a new leadership team: Sam Bayley (Department Manager, Director of Professional Services), Nicola Carslaw (Director of Research), Ioan Fazey (Director for Strategy), Claire Hughes (Deputy HoD, Director of Teaching and Learning).
In November 2019, the Department underwent a strategic review. From this came an action plan and a lot of recommendations for improvements to the Department's strategy and operations.
We unveiled a new vision statement in January 2020, and in the past few months we have been working on developing our accountability structure.
We will be continuing to develop our accountability structure and strategy, using group meetings and workshops; we are aiming to publish our strategy covering the next three years in September.

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The leadership team have been considering our three-year strategy, and our long-term vision, alongside the University's work in developing its strategy.
Environmental sustainability is a huge part of the university's long-term strategy.
A key part of our strategic review action plan is to look at how we can free up more time for colleagues to carry out research.
We have recruited a few additional professional support roles already but we hope there will be more in the future (unlikely to be in the very short term).

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Below is our updated Accountability Structure, which outlines the areas for which each member of our Environment and Geography Leadership Team (EGLT) is accountable. Having a clear structure which divides responsibilities between the team allows us to be more efficient, agile and proactive.

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The roles of Director for Students and Director for Engagement & Partnerships are currently vacant; these roles will be part of the department leadership team.
The Head of Department sits at the top of the structure and is accountable for everything that happens within the department. However, like with other roles, this doesn't mean Roland does everything - delegation is an important part of Roland's role.

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Learning and Teaching needs dedicated and strategic leadership.
Claire has realised over the last few years that she wants to focus her career on learning and teaching leadership and thus has asked to be transferred to a teaching and scholarship contract. This will give Claire the time to take on the Director of Learning and Teaching role, which she is very excited about.
Our longer term goal will be to establish a team of teaching and scholarship staff in the department. They will be leading on learning and teaching development, as well as pedagogic research on environmental education. This will help us to become influential in terms of our pedagogy, which will support our long term goal.

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There is no separate Chair of Teaching Committee role within the structure as this will be part of the Director of Learning and Teaching role.
The Chair of Board of Studies role will be reduced and will mainly focus on governance around learning and teaching in the department.
The DTL role will become more strategic; accountabilities will be clear to avoid duplication of effort.
These accountabilities are not set in stone; once the roles have been filled, the team will be able to firm them up.

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This is a new role for the department.
Student support has become increasingly important and is a major part of our business.
We need dedicated and strategic leadership for student welfare.

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The Director for Students will work with the roles above to ensure that students are fully supported and are able to achieve their full potential.
They will also be working very closely with staff in Professional Services.

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There won't be a big change for the Director of Research but the accountabilities have been more clearly spelled out.
Nic has met with everyone within the research accountability structure to help to tweak the accountabilities.
All of the roles within the structure already exist; we are working on formalising who does what.

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It would be useful to get feedback on these accountabilities from staff members who are seeing this structure for the first time.
The role of Graduate Chair sits within the Research hierarchy to reflect the nature of these students.
We are looking to update the departmental research strategy; we are having an extra DRC meeting on the 4th May to start to think about how we can approach increasing research from 24% of our time to 40%.

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We are aiming to align our strategy goals with the university's goals.
The Director of Strategy will look at how our short-term decisions will affect the long term.
The accountability is not to decide the strategy, but to facilitate its development and help implement it.
The work being done on research and teaching strategies is key to developing the overall strategy.
Despite the current situation, the university's work on environmental sustainability is still continuing.

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The structure is a bit more broad/vague for strategy. Charlotte (the project officer for strategy) is pulling everything together, for everyone to feed in to.
There will be a series of workshops of around 30 people with external facilitators; we are working on a design to allow more people to become involved and take ideas forward. This could involve focus groups, for example.

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There are not too many changes in this role as we have already been working on structure and accountabilities.
The Department Manager is responsible for the smooth running of the department
The Professional Services team support the delivery of other areas and help to reduce the administrative burden on students, academic staff, and other colleagues within the university.

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The SS Manager(s) (Bryan and Michelle) and their team support teaching and learning, governance, delivery of teaching and students (inductions, welfare).
The Research Facilitator (currently Andy, Laura from June) supports research and consultancy; they work closely with Nic.
The Technical Manager (Dave) is supported by a team of technicians.
The Department Administration Coordinator (Zoe) is responsible for HR processes and general administration (supported by the PA).
The Project Manager (Charlotte) will be working closely with Ioan on strategy support.
The Industry Liaison Officer (Jenny) will be working closely with the new Academic Employabilty and Careers Officer, and the Director for Students.

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This role is currently vacant. The role would include developing relationships with key partners, and working with people within the university to make us more visible.
The accountabilities will be worked out when the role is filled; the structure is currently just a draft.

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We will need to fill the two vacant roles in the leadership team.
There will be number of teaching and research meetings happening, as well as the strategy workshops coming up.
We will be looking at our core values and how we can use them to move forward.

Further comments / feedback from questions

We will be thinking about how we can best work with SEI-Y and YESI moving forward in order to maximise our potential. YESI are currently going through a transitional period due to a change in leadership; once this is in position, this might make things clearer.
We are keen to get feedback on all aspects of the accountability structure. Following questions relating to SEI-Y and Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, Ioan will follow up with the leads in those areas. It was noted that non-EU visas will be more expensive, and it is still uncertain how EU members will be affected, so this should be considered by the EDI committee.
In the future, we will grow our T&S team through our recruitment strategy, though we would consider moving staff to T&S contracts where they would like to do this.
The process for filling the vacant roles will start with asking for volunteers. If there are no volunteers, the leadership team have people in mind to approach. We would like to fill these roles with people who are enthusiastic and passionate; this is a chance for career progression and to take on a leadership role. We will make sure that these fit into the workload allocation model, and may reallocate work to allow for this. To apply or find out more, please contact Roland via environment-hod@york.ac.uk.

Further Feedback

To allow us to collate all of your comments together in one place, please provide us feedback using this very simple Google Form. We are very keen to hear from colleagues.

If anything is not clear or you have questions about the presentation, please email Lucy at It also helps to ensure that the roles within EGLT are transparent and can be clearly understood by the department, by our wider UOY community and by our external partners.

Click the images below to increase the size of the slides. Alternatively, you can view a PDF version of the Accountability Structure here.

Our Accountability Structure remains a work in progress and if you have any feedback or questions, please email environment-pa@york.ac.uk.

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