Around the country, children have returned to school and students are returning – or starting – university. The pandemic may not be over, but many semblances of normality are returning. It’s been a long time for all of us, but if you are a young person, the last eighteen months has been a huge proportion…
Throughout my career, I’ve always had a very distinctive feeling at this time of year. You know that Autumn is in the air. The mornings are a little darker and a little cooler. The leaves beginning to turn. The “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” is upon us. Despite a careful reading of Keats’s poem,…
It’s not true, of course, that universities close up shop in late July and August. There’s always a lot of work going on across campuses, visibly and less visibly. The academic financial year ends on 31 July, so finance teams are busy with year-end activities. A-level, International Baccalaureate and BTEC results are out in mid-August…
The Government has announced that all legal pandemic restrictions will end on July 19. Covid is not over: as the new Health Secretary, Sajid Javid has said, as a society we are going to need to learn to live with Covid-19. Clearly, he isn’t wrong: Covid-19 is simply the latest coronavirus in global circulation. Four…
This blog is a week – to be more accurate, a week and a day – later. I took a week’s leave last week. and we went away for a week of walking, cycling and exploring to a remote corner of Herefordshire. We might have chosen a week of better weather, but it was nonetheless…
There’s an old, and now very hackneyed story which used to feature a lot in management training courses, about how (the example was always a frog) if a frog is in a saucepan of water which is gently heated, it simply doesn’t notice the change in temperature until it’s too late for it to react.…
We are all beginning to move out into the world again. About ten days ago, I set off to Shirecliffe in north-east Sheffield for what was probably my first visit on behalf of the university for fourteen months. In Shirecliffe, the University has partnered with Save the Children, Sheffield City Council and Watercliffe Meadows School…
A couple of years ago, before the pandemic, I hosted a dinner for Hallam alumni who lived in an overseas city where I’d been doing a lecture tour. It was a great evening, drawing together Hallam alumni from several decades ago as well as very recent graduates. They all got on very well. At one…
As “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” discovered with Humpty Dumpty, it’s always difficult to put things back together. So we should all be sympathetic to civil servants and ministers as they attempt to navigate a road map out of Covid lockdowns. Nonetheless, the government’s announcement last week that there should be…
I try to go for a walk early every morning – a half hour turn around the streets near home. Although it’s an urban walk, as the mornings have got lighter, there are unmistakable signs of spring: bulbs in verges, trees coming into leaf and into blossom, birdsong. It’s a reminder that behind the timetables…