4.2 Key priorities for future action
Over the next five years our priorities will develop, reflecting continuing challenges and new circumstances.
Inclusive education Working to enhance the diversity of the student body is central to our activity [2017AP. Themes 4&5]. We have targets for increasing female participation on the MBA and male participation on MSc courses. Our work on student voice, engagement, and belonging will continue and expand. New priorities will include: o Awarding gaps: with new data streams, we can better identify gaps at the intersection of characteristics and are building a programme of work to tackle these. o Incorporating UDL principles into our classroom delivery, and ensuring principles of inclusive education are sustained as we engage new technologies. Staff composition Senior faculty are more likely to be male [2017AP. Themes 1&2]. This limits mentoring arrangements, shapes the leadership of the school, and our impact and income profiles. This is a major challenge, because all leading schools face the same problem. We commit to one third of the professoriate being female by 2028. o We will continue with our strategy of supporting, developing, and promoting outstanding female faculty. o An ambitious international hiring programme will take place. o Many female faculty find the HoG role unappealling. Work to understand this and make necessary changes will be undertaken. The research environment The research environment cut across numerous thematic concerns in our 2017AP [themes 1, 2, 4 & 5] but will be a new priority through to 2028. The chair of the research committee has been asked to produce an explicit gender strategy that will: o Ensure multiple impact cases with female leads are submitted to REF2028. o Increase the number of female research leads – there is currently one (from nine). o Strengthen female research networks. The future of work and the new building Following Covid, we remain quite transformed as a workplace. PSS staff value new flexible arrangements; academic presence in the building has not returned to pre-Covid levels. Questions have arisen about the future of work and tensions between flexibility and belonging [2017AP. Theme 6]. Student attendance at lectures was falling prior to Covid, and students continue to value online interaction and asynchronous context. These matters are especially pertinent, as we are in the process of designing a new business school building
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