Christmas and New Year is traditionally a time for reflecting on the old year and looking ahead to the new.  As 2017 draws to a close we have just held our first Christmas symposium as a new school and I was pleased to see so many staff attending.  It was a great opportunity for academic, technical and professional support staff to come together and also for all the new academic staff who have joined us over the past 12 months to introduce themselves and their work.

For me it was an opportunity to provide some reflection on what has, undoubtedly, been a rather turbulent year for everyone. Restructuring and the introduction of many new systems have been stressful, that’s something we need to acknowledge.  But as I commented, in somewhat Churchillian style at the symposium, although this may not be the beginning of the end, it may be the end of the beginning.  We are able to celebrate some very real achievements, and to have come through such a major reorganisation with minimal disruption to our core operations, is a major achievement in itself.  The benefit in looking back is being able to see what we have done well, what not so well.  This helps us to identify the ways in which we could improve our performance, what past good practice we can draw upon for the whole school, and where we can seek new opportunities.

One of our great strengths is our diversity of disciplines and the unique blend this brings to our research. This sits alongside our well established links with industry and with government.  As I have said before this aligns with what the country needs at the moment and is a good fit with the kind of approach the government is actively seeking.  The world of commerce have recently taken up what they call Open Innovation, which brings together academia and businesses that seek new interventions – for example that could be a chemical company needing to draw on engineering expertise or modelling skills.  The kind of diversity we can offer will help to solve real world challenges that don’t necessarily fit neatly into disciplinary boxes, and I don’t only mean in applied contexts.  It’s clear that the government is also looking for innovative thinking and big ideas and sees the universities as the potential source.  This is very much being driven by Brexit but our international research is also in a very good place at the moment.  It’s gratifying to see Newcastle improving its world ranking and that sets an encouraging direction of travel for the future.

Although change is often daunting, we need to remember that the challenges we face here are small compared with those that the whole UK is facing, and also those the country has come through in the past. Major social changes set in motion by, for example, the loss of the coal industry, seemed to shake the foundations of North East England, but the region has survived and Newcastle continues to flourish.  The issues we have to deal with in the school are internal ones and within our power to fix.  The opportunities are external and have to be seized.  Hearing our new academics presenting at the symposium reminded me of this – they represent over a quarter of our academic staff and they bring a new perspective and fresh ideas.  Perhaps our greatest weakness in 2017 has been not blowing our own trumpet sufficiently loudly.  Let’s make that one of the things we change in 2018 and let’s all ensure we promote our successes more widely.

I want to thank everyone for their hard work over the past year and I would particularly like to mention the professionalism of the support and technical staff. We couldn’t function without them on the team and their dedication in getting on with the job over the past year has been very much appreciated.  Academic staff have also been seizing the positive linkages offered in the new structure, reshaping research groupings and teaching programmes to take advantage of these new opportunities.  Thank you all.  This all promises an exciting start to 2018 and early in the new year we will be organising workshops for all staff to get involved in planning our next steps.

In the meantime I would like to wish you and your families a relaxing holiday break, a very Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year.