College of Medical, Veterinary & Life Sciences

MVLS 2033 is a project to guide and manage the realisation of a significant new investment in the College’s people, facilities and infrastructure. This investment will help the College achieve its ten-year vision, which is centred around becoming internationally recognised across our four College Futures themes.

MVLS 2025 facilitated the creation of a supporting infrastructure to enable the College to realise its bold vision. This next phase is about investing to develop and enhance our workforce, giving us the tools and resources to embed excellence in all that we do.

Over the coming years we will make significant investments in our workforce, across all areas of the College. We are setting up workstreams with leadership from senior academic and professional service colleagues and membership from across the schools and services, to ensure we develop a recruitment and retention strategy that satisfies the needs and capacity of the different areas of the College. At the heart of all recruitment will be diversity and excellence. We want a diverse workforce that will deliver world-class research and teaching.

A lot of thought continues to be put into fostering the careers of early career researchers, guided by our Research Strategy. More broadly, early career academics will be at the heart of the College’s future. We will be investing heavily in the recruitment of new staff at early career stages, including opportunities arising from our strategy to increase our intake of new lecturers, and the development of existing staff.

Over the course of the next 10 years we aim to recruit a significant number of new staff to support our ambitions. The actual number will be determined as we progress. The growth will be planned in a coordinated manner that staggers recruitment over the course of the 10 year period.

We will continue to promote and expand our diversity, by considering how our growth plans can be as inclusive as possible, while also ensuring that we attract and value the contributions from colleagues and students from all backgrounds. Encouraging applications from under-represented groups will play an important part of our recruitment strategy.

We do not plan on making changes to individual roles or duties as part of the College’s growth. Notwithstanding that, all roles evolve over time.

The four themes are intentionally broad and cover all areas of our College. There will be ongoing opportunity for dialogue regarding how existing and future areas of focus will evolve to ensure that our profile and successes arising from themes include opportunities for all of us to make distinct and aligned contributions. The College will always be open to new challenges that arise over the next 10 years and horizon scanning will remain an important part of our outlook.

Some professional service teams will grow to support the academic and student growth. The MVLS 2033 proposals do not require changes to professional service team structures, but we will continue to review arrangements to ensure the best structure for our College and Schools, and best integration with services across the University. While some budgetary assumptions have been made to help us imagine how such capacity will evolve, the details of such investments will be informed by our ongoing, detailed work.

Yes, School and College level planning will continue to ensure that technical facilities, jobs and skills development are in line with operational needs and strategic opportunities. This will be in keeping with the University’s Technician Commitment action plan. We have already started important work to coordinate our core technical facilities on a shared basis, to enhance the availability of high quality and advanced capabilities. In turn, this will make our academic environment more attractive for our staff, students and partner organisations, as well as enhancing the careers of technical specialists.

Yes. We will be investing in all areas of our College. To be world leaders, we need the environment and equipment to support us.

With growth of this scale, we anticipate the need for new buildings to accommodate our activities. We are working with the University to plan this. In the interim, a workstream has been established and external consultants hired to undertake a review of the quality of our estate and how well it is being utilised. We will also work with School leadership teams to pilot new ways of utilising existing space to support growth in the short term.

The scale of investment we are planning will cost a lot of money. We are fortunate that the University has committed to investing in our plans. Some additional income from student growth is required but this will be planned growth and we envision that the work ongoing through the Education Strategy to diversify our portfolio and streamlining our teaching practices will support this. We do not anticipate that student growth will outstrip the additional academic and professional services capacity that we will be recruiting.

Staff and student recruitment will be planned with workloads taken into account.

Management teams from across the College will play a key role in determining the academic and professional staff resource needs that are required. We will continue to invest in workload allocation systems to assist Heads of School, line managers and individuals to ensure that workloads are fair and manageable, that associated policies and systems are transparent, and that dialogue through line management is available and encouraged both regularly and through PDR. 

All growth will be thoughtfully planned alongside the estate requirements. A workstream has been established that specifically focuses on our workspaces. Alongside local College initiatives, the University is investing in buildings and the timetabling project is ongoing to help us to better utilise our teaching space. The resources required to enable the growth and foster the delivery of world class education and student experience will be central to the planning and investment.

Six workstreams have been established to support the ambitious plans, with representation from across the College, Schools, and wider University. Each workstream will liaise widely with colleagues to plan for and implement the necessary work packages.

This is recording of the MVLS 2033 Townhall session delivered by Head of College Prof Iain McInnes to the School of Health & Wellbeing on 18 September 2023: