These past few months have seen a period of extraordinary change. In what we hope will be a once in a generation event, the Covid-19 pandemic has had far-reaching consequences for us all and I hope that you and your families are healthy and well.
This week, local children returned to school, marking a milestone in our journey towards our new normal. I’m conscious of the interdependence between the university and our local community and, over the coming weeks, together we will reach another milestone. While the university remained open throughout the lockdown period, supporting students who remained in halls and maintaining the campus, from next week staff will start to return to working from campus and, from Saturday 12 September, students will start to arrive to live in halls of residence.
Term will start on 21 September and while we will be welcoming students onto campus, we expect this to be quite a different term, one where we do familiar things in different ways.
In preparation for the return of students, over the summer we have worked hard to seek to create a Covid-19 secure campus that reflects government guidelines and the importance we place in playing our part in helping to protect our whole community. I’d like to share some of the steps we’ve taken, with more detail included later in this issue of Community Matters.
In line with social distancing guidance, students who are living in our halls of residence will be arriving in allocated time slots over an extended period starting from Saturday 12 September, 2020, with induction activities beginning week commencing 21 September, 2020. This means there will be no local road closures this year.
Students living in our halls of residence will be grouped into households and they will be expected to maintain social distancing with people they don’t live with. The same will be expected of students living in shared private housing. For students arriving from countries where the UK Government requires a period of self-isolation, and who are staying in our halls of residence, we will provide self-isolation accommodation.
Along with the Covid-secure measures we are putting in place, we are taking a number of steps to communicate to our students the importance of adhering to social distancing and hygiene guidelines, as well as the importance of being considerate neighbours, and our expectations of them both on and off campus.
In terms of our academic delivery, in response to the pandemic, we have adapted all of our courses for 2020/21 to combine face-to-face and online teaching and learning support. This so called ‘blended approach’ builds in flexibility to both accommodate social distancing, so fewer students on campus and in teaching spaces at the same time, and seeks to ensure that, if further restrictions or lockdowns are imposed, students won’t have interrupted study. We are also offering a January 2021 start for some of our postgraduate courses. You can read more about our flexible learning approach here.
These are uncertain and challenging times for us all, and I’d like to thank you, our neighbours, for your continued support of the university.
Professor Paul Layzell
Principal,
Royal Holloway, University of London
