Campus conversation: Cost of living crisis forces UHI Moray to 'work clever'
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This week on campus, our conversations have been mainly about money – not the most comfortable conversations to have in these inflationary times.
We’ve all seen the impact of rising prices in our personal lives, on our food, our fuel and our family leisure time.
At UHI Moray we recognise the detrimental impact that these elevated rates of inflation are also having on our student population.
We’ve been ‘working clever’ this year to maximise the proportion of the student support funds we receive from government that we can get directly into the hands of our students as they continue to juggle study, work, and family commitments.
Gordon and MacPhail have enabled us to provide a free breakfast for our students through the worst winter months.
Our conversations this week though, have focussed on the operation of the college itself, and the constrained funding we’re working with.
This is the time of year when government budget settlements are passed through to us by various agencies in the form of funding allocations for the next academic year.
Those allocations are as challenging as you might imagine.
‘Flat cash’ settlements for our core programmes next year means a quantum of funding that gives no help with current or future inflationary pressures.
Significant actual reductions in apprenticeship funding means we will run out of money for these employer-based training programmes even earlier than we did this year, as demand outstrips what we are funded to supply.
So how to move forward in this hostile environment?
We’ve talked this week about a wide range of initiatives designed to protect the future of our college for our community, but we have to recognise that our teams cannot keep delivering more with less.
We have to prioritise our priorities.
We can only do so with the continued support, ingenuity and flexibility of our staff.
Our lecturing and support staff responded instantly as Covid struck in March 2020, moving classes immediately online with little disruption to students.
Staff surprised themselves then with their own resilience and were highly innovative, determined to make the best of a difficult, some would say impossible, situation.
We might feel less resilient now, but we need to continue with this ‘can do’ approach, even if we can’t do everything we’d like to.
We’ll continue to support our local communities above and beyond our traditional college and university programmes.
Whether that’s welcoming over 600 new senior phase pupils to start their college programmes in June; or helping deliver improvement plans in New Elgin and Buckie; supporting the integration of Ukrainian and other refugees through ESOL lessons; enabling those far from the job market to get closer to new employment opportunities; or delivering family ‘skills’ events at our Linkwood Technology Centre – we’ll still be here.
And we’ll still be planning for an exciting future developing the next generation of high level skills in Moray.
Forgive us if the silkiness of the services we offer occasionally frays a little around the edge of what might look suspiciously like the ear of a sow.
