No 6818
Wednesday 11 March 2026
Vol clvi No 23
pp. 374–386
16 March, Monday. Scarlet Day. Congregation of the Regent House at 2.45 p.m. (ceremonial installation of the Chancellor).
17 March, Tuesday. Discussion by videoconference at 2 p.m. (see below).
20 March, Friday. Full Term ends.
25 March, Wednesday. Lent Term ends. Last ordinary issue of the Reporter in Lent Term.
28 March, Saturday. Congregation of the Regent House at 10 a.m.
5 April, Sunday. Easter Day. Scarlet Day.
|
Discussions (Tuesdays at 2 p.m.) |
Congregations (at 10 a.m. unless otherwise stated) |
|
17 March |
16 March, 2.45 p.m. (ceremonial installation of the Chancellor) 28 March 11 April |
The Vice-Chancellor invites members of the Regent House, University and College employees, registered students and others qualified under the regulations for Discussions (Statutes and Ordinances, 2024, p. 111) to attend a Discussion by videoconference on Tuesday, 17 March 2026 at 2 p.m. The following items will be discussed:
1.Report of the Council, dated 18 February 2026, on the demolition of the former Cavendish Laboratory buildings in Cambridge West (Reporter, 6815, 2025–26, p. 348).
2.Report of the Council, dated 18 February 2026, on changes to Statutes J 4 and C XV (Reporter, 6815, 2025–26, p. 349).
Those wishing to join the Discussion by videoconference should email Discussions@admin.cam.ac.uk providing their CRSid (if a member of the collegiate University), by 10 a.m. on the date of the Discussion to receive joining instructions. Alternatively contributors may email their remarks to Discussions@admin.cam.ac.uk, by no later than 10 a.m. on the day of the Discussion for reading out by the Proctors,1 or may ask someone else who is attending to read the remarks on their behalf.
In accordance with the regulations for Discussions, the Chair of the Board of Scrutiny or any ten members of the Regent House2 may request that the Council arrange for one or more of the items listed for discussion to be discussed in person (usually in the Senate-House). Requests should be made to the Director of Governance and Compliance, on paper or by email to UniversityDraftsman@admin.cam.ac.uk from addresses within the cam.ac.uk domain, by no later than 9 a.m. on the day of the Discussion. Any changes to the Discussion schedule will be confirmed in the Reporter at the earliest opportunity.
For general information on Discussions see the Reporter website at https://www.reporter.admin.cam.ac.uk/discussions.
1Any comments sent by email should please begin with the name and title of the contributor as they wish it to be read out and include at the start a note of any College and/or Departmental affiliations held.
2https://www.scrutiny.cam.ac.uk/ and https://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/reporter/regent_house_roll/.
The Vice-Chancellor gives notice that she has accepted with gratitude a benefaction of £5m* from an anonymous donor to endow a Betty Wu Lee Professorship of Women and the Arts of China before 1900. The General Board is proposing the establishment of the Professorship in perpetuity and an endowment fund to support the Professorship (see p. 383 and Graces 1 and 2, p. 384).
*13 March 2026: An amendment was made to correct the amount of the donation.
The Council has received the Board of Scrutiny’s Thirtieth Report and the remarks made at the Discussion on 4 November 2025 (Reporter, 2025–26: 6800, p. 64; 6803, p. 110). It has provided its response below to the Board’s recommendations and the remarks made at the Discussion.
The Council thanks the Board for its continued commitment to identifying areas where the University could do better. The Council hopes its responses to the Board’s recommendations, and the comments on them from contributors to the Discussion, show that it has given considered thought to the points made.
The Council agrees with the Board that its separateness allows it to provide an independent view of decisions taken by the Council and the General Board during the previous year, through the review of the Reports and accounts included within its remit. The Council believes the Regent House values the Board’s analysis of the effectiveness of measures taken to improve the operations of the University.
The Council congratulates the Board on its thirtieth birthday and commends it for marking the occasion by carrying out a self-effectiveness review, to reflect on how it can improve its own work. It looks forward to the Board’s contributions to the endeavours of the University in the years to come.
The Council agrees with the Board that transparency is essential in the governance of a public institution. The Council routinely publishes its minutes to the University community as soon as they are approved. Members of the Regent House can therefore have a timely overview of the matters discussed by the Council as well as its decisions. A number of other committees, including the General Board (the University’s most senior committee that oversees academic and educational policy), the Finance Committee and the Audit Committee (the two statutory committees of the Council) make their minutes available to members of the Regent House.
The Council thanks the Board for its suggestions to explore whether the practice of publishing minutes to the Regent House could be rolled out more comprehensively for other senior committees of the Council and the General Board. It sees that this could send an important signal to the University community and help foster the understanding that the Council and its committees make their decisions in the best interests of the University. The Council, through its Secretariat, will engage with its sub-committees to determine a list of committees whose minutes should be made available to Regent House members going forward. When engaging in these discussions, the Council will be mindful that there is a balance to be struck between transparency and the need to keep proper records of the deliberations of sub-committees, which have to grapple with difficult and sometimes sensitive issues. The Council would not wish to take any action which compromises the integrity of the University’s decision-making processes, for instance, by affecting the ability of its sub‑committees to communicate openly with the Council. The Council will report on the results of these discussions as part of its annual report in Michaelmas Term 2026. It anticipates that the result of these discussions will be that minutes of the open agenda of the majority of its sub-committees will be publicly available to members of the University.
The Council is proud of the University’s culture as a self-governing institution and understands the Council itself as a crucial part of it. The academic voice is at the heart of the University’s decision-making, including on the Council (the University’s trustee body) where the majority of members are academics of the University elected by the Regent House.
The Council agrees that consultation on important issues is an effective tool to engage the University community. The University’s governance provides a well-established mechanism for consultation in relation to matters of the Regent House: the Discussions of Reports. As Professor Evans points out in her remarks, it is easy to contribute to these Discussions as remarks can ‘simply be emailed to the Proctors’. The Council considers the remarks made in such a Discussion and responds in writing to the points before it asks the Regent House to approve the proposal explained in the Report. The Council regards this as an important mechanism to hear the thoughts of the University community and to ensure that all aspects of a proposal have been thoroughly tested. It encourages members of the Regent House to make use of their opportunity to comment on proposals in Discussions. The Council’s Business Committee helps to ensure that all points on the topic of a proposal raised in a Discussion are adequately responded to.
Review groups routinely publish the outcomes of consultations with the University community in their reports.1 The Council has used mechanisms such as consultative Reports in the past to gauge the opinion of members of the University during the design phase of a proposal rather than at the end of it. For instance, when the Council determined its proposal for future eligibility of Regent House membership, it consulted with the Regent House on two options before it published a final proposal. The Council will continue to consider such mechanisms for proposals of similar fundamental importance to the University community, noting that sometimes time-constraints during the approval process tip the balance against such an approach.
The recommendation of the Board went one step further and also suggested that the Council consider making the papers of its open agenda available to the University. The Council understands the good intentions behind the suggestions, but notes that transparency, as a principle of good governance, sits alongside trust in those who are empowered to make decisions and the need for a space in committees for free and frank deliberations. The primary purpose of Council papers is to enable it to explore issues in full, however challenging and potentially controversial the matter. The Council relies on those drafting papers to use frank language to assess the impact, positive and negative, of all options. It believes that there is a risk that the quality of such assessments could be affected if future publication to the University community is on the mind of those drafting papers. Nevertheless, it has agreed to consider this matter further by the end of the current academic year.
The Council notes the Board’s ongoing concerns, in Mr Hopwood’s words, about unstrategic, financial decision-making to achieve the broad goal of 5% savings. Schools and institutions are expected to achieve the planned reductions in expenditure in 2025–26 and to sustain these in 2026–27. The Resource Management Committee, chaired by the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Resources and Operations, is focusing its work on the achievement of sustainable and enduring reductions in expenditure (or increased income), beyond the short-term measures which have been necessary in 2024–25 and 2025–26.
The Enhanced Financial Transparency (EFT) prototype, which provides the most disaggregated data possible given the University’s existing accounting system, has now been extended to departmental level, and has been shared with Heads of Schools, Heads of Institutions and Heads of Departments together with associated senior officers across the University. The prototype presents a reasonable (but not perfect) view of revenues and costs disaggregated to a departmental level, which will allow members of the University to understand better the likely shape of the results of disaggregated income and expenditure reporting when the new finance system is put in place. There will be a significant increase in the engagement with Schools and NSIs over the next 12 months to prepare for EFT and the associated budgeting and business planning processes.
This is an important recommendation and, under the aegis of the Change and Programme Management Board (CPMB), a multi-disciplinary team is currently working to establish a computer platform, which will be used to track dependencies among the major transformation programmes. The platform will help to ensure that the respective change and implementation activities affecting members of the University’s community are scheduled in a coordinated manner. It will have two purposes: (i) to enable detailed programme planning and management by the CPMB and those leading the programmes; and (ii) to provide an accurate basis for producing a simplified view of activities to allow University staff more widely to understand the progress of, and the interdependencies among, the transformation programmes. The platform will identify the impact of other major University change activities on the timelines of the transformation programmes.
Because of the extensive range of major change activities, both within and outside the remit of the CPMB, this task is difficult. However, it has been made substantially easier by a number of recent developments, which make the delivery of an accurate and timely picture for staff feasible, including the following:
•Enhanced coordination between the transformation programmes and the UIS portfolio of major activities, brought about by the active involvement of the new Chief Information Officer.
•The Change Partners2, who work to ensure change is managed sensibly in their allotted Schools and NSIs, have now developed tools such as the sentiment tracker, which enables staff to be surveyed on their attitudes to the net level of change being exerted both by the transformation programmes and by other major activities. These tools, in turn, will inform the rate and timing of change and delivery planned and the output from the platform.
•A review of how the Change and Programme Management Office (CPMO) could best support future needs was conducted with senior leaders of change programmes during July and August 2025 and has added impetus to this activity. An important demand for the future, in the light of the University’s financial situation, is for the Council, the General Board and the senior leadership of the University3 to have visibility of all major activities ‘in flight’ and when, and how, the associated quantitative benefits will land in a planned and obvious way. This is also essential because it will allow the return on the investment in these major activities to be monitored and understood. The platform will be extended, in due course, to track the benefits.
Presently, the multi-disciplinary team, involving experts from UIS, the CPMO, the transformation programmes and the Office of External Affairs and Communications, is working to develop an initial prototype of the platform and the output aimed at informing the wider University community. This initial design will be assessed with various stakeholder groups to understand what ‘good’ looks like in terms of visual, user-friendly portfolio roadmaps that will make it easier for colleagues to see what has recently been delivered and what will be happening next. This might be shared, for example, in the Key Issues Bulletin and Staff Hub each month, highlighting recent progress and forthcoming milestones.
The work of the team will involve the following:
•Identifying stakeholder groups requiring information.
•Identifying the level of detail and time horizon required by each stakeholder group.
•Establishing the content of each plan, potentially covering delivery milestones, major change, communications, cutover to new systems, etc.
•Deciding the initial scope. Clearly, the plans will cover transformation programmes, but as noted above, for many stakeholders a key risk is the totality of change, so the breadth of coverage of major activities is an important factor to be determined.
•Identifying time horizons. Different groups of stakeholders will require detail over various time horizons, e.g. one month, three months, one year.
•Communicating the plan and publication formats. The communications lead on the group will work with the Change Partners to develop versions suitable for each School and NSI group. Concurrently, the team will develop a consistent, simple online page to explain each project.
Oversight of this activity rests with the CPMB, but, as noted above, will not be limited to change associated solely with the transformation programmes within its remit.
The Council trusts that this approach will give the transparency desired by the Board. The approach will drive accountability for timing and for ensuring change and delivery is planned in a collegial manner.
The Council joins the Board in welcoming the revised governance structure for undergraduate admissions and notes its recommendation that the University closely monitors its implementation and ensures ongoing consultation with subject representatives. The Council is conscious that although there has been wide agreement about the need for reform for many years, until recently there has been an absence of consensus about the nature of reform, and previous proposals had foundered for that reason.
The governance structure that took effect from the start of the 2025–26 academic year reflects the reality that Colleges are the admitting bodies for undergraduates, and that arrangements should not undermine this statutory responsibility and nor should they seek to diminish the autonomy of individual Colleges. Discussions about the nature of reform were therefore necessarily College-led, but there was widespread recognition of the need for University representation in the newly created Undergraduate Admissions Committee (UAC) and its three sub-committees, for Operations, Strategic Planning and Access respectively. The memberships of these bodies reflect this, including the presence of School representatives and other University members on the UAC. This constitutes the first time that key bodies determining admissions policy and processes have University representation, a development welcomed by the Council.
The Council shares the Board’s view about the importance of consultation with ‘subject representatives’. One of the roles of School representatives on the UAC is to ensure that School, Faculty and Department perspectives are taken into account in the decision-making process. The Council notes that many of the College representatives are simultaneously Admissions Convenors, Directors of Studies or otherwise engaged in undergraduate education. The UAC and its sub‑committees will engage in wider consultation beyond their direct memberships as business dictates. An early example of this in practice has been the consultation with the Mathematics Directors of Studies Committee and others about the proposed introduction of the Test of Mathematics for University Admission (TMUA) for entry from 2027 onwards, and with their support the proposal was subsequently ratified by the UAC.
The Board calls for a greater degree of consistency in admissions policies and processes, a view shared by the Council. The UAC has initiated consideration of the extent to which there is appetite for consistency of approach in the collegiate context of Cambridge, and of the aspects of the process where this may be most desirable. Given the autonomy of Colleges and their role as the admitting bodies, this can only be achieved by consensus.
The Council acknowledges that carrying forward the Review’s recommendations places significant responsibility on Faculties, Director of Study (DoS) Committees, supervisors and others. This reflects the devolved nature of the collegiate University educational model. A more unified, centralised approach could accelerate change but risks undermining this federated culture. Instead, the focus will be on enabling and supporting engagement with this responsibility through the provision of clear guidance, shared resources, a clear evidence base, and regular reporting as noted by the Board. To date, Education Services, on behalf of the Review’s Task and Finish Group, has taken a minimalist approach to communicating actions, both to avoid overwhelming those concerned and to align implementation with other initiatives such as the Pathways to Inclusive Practice programme. Education Services will continue to provide at least termly updates on the Review’s SharePoint site4 and will provide more proactive, wider communication on specific items as progress is made, acting in collaboration with the Academic Leadership Fellow (Teaching Review). Education Services will consider sharing information more widely, for example through the Key Issues Bulletin or the Reporter. The team would also encourage engagement by any individual with their GBEC representatives.
The Board suggests that there would be greater transparency and better communication if all Directors of Studies had access to information rather than just Chairs of DoS committees. This appears to be a reference to the minutes area of the Supporting Supervisions SharePoint site.5 The purpose of this area of the site is to increase transparency between DoS Committees and the Senior Tutors’ Education Committee, and between DoS Committees in cognate subjects. This is served most readily through providing Chairs with access and trusting their dissemination of relevant content to Directors of Studies in their discipline (there is no existing distribution list for Directors of Studies). As noted in the response to the Board’s recommendation (a), when considering opening up access to minutes and other papers received by committees, it is important to consider the impacts of those changes in the round. Education Services will review access to the minutes, in consultation with Intercollegiate Services Ltd and the Senior Tutors’ Committee.
The team fully agrees with the drive for empirical evidence and is consulting with colleagues in the Cambridge Centre for Teaching and Learning, and with colleagues in the Russell Group, to ensure it is collecting and communicating this evidence.
The Council welcomes the Board of Scrutiny’s support of the Strategy and acknowledges that improvements should be made to the communication of work underway and delivered to date (including enhanced family leave provision, greater support for international staff, a new career pathway for research staff, improved pay progression for academic staff in Grades 9–11, renewal of the University’s Athena SWAN silver award).
As a first step, the HR Committee has approved a set of initial measures that will be published in Lent Term 2026 on the HR website as a dashboard, together with a progress report updated in real time. Currently, the largely paper-based and devolved nature of HR activity would require significant manual effort to measure; the HR Committee is keen not to add unnecessarily to the workloads of colleagues in Schools, Faculties and Departments at this time. Once implemented, the new HR system (myHR) will significantly increase the ability to measure activity in greater range and detail, and the suite of People Strategy measures will be expanded. The Council will also ensure the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for University Community and Engagement keeps the Colleges Committee briefed on progress.
The Council notes the Board’s general concern about the effectiveness of communication between the University and the Regent House. It agrees that communication and transparency play a vital role in creating trust, driving positive cultural change, and engaging members of the University in important issues, policies and projects that affect them.
The Council also acknowledges the Board’s particular interest in developing new forms of engagement that bring colleagues closer to senior leaders and those making decisions, so as to improve dialogue and feedback. However, the Council is aware that there is a genuine concern from Schools, Faculties and Departments about the volume of communication from the central University and the number of consultations that staff are asked to contribute to. Any new forms of engagement should be mindful of this. There should also be a sensible balance struck between the number of feedback mechanisms available and the University’s capacity for timely and effective delivery of operational work, especially at a time when workloads are challenging.
Dr Plummer-Braeckman points out that many new channels of communication have been developed in recent years. All staff now receive a twice-termly newsletter by email, and are invited to attend termly town hall meetings (where frank and often difficult questions are in fact put to senior University leaders). In addition to termly all-staff meetings, the University runs issue-specific meetings, such as the one organised in the summer of 2025 by the Working Group on Investments in and Research Funded by Companies Belonging to the Defence Sector, which also considered more than 600 written submissions.
Other channels of communication include monthly online briefings for heads of institutions and institutions’ management teams (many of whom play an active role in sharing and contextualising information with staff and students in academic institutions), and the weekly Key Issues Bulletin, which rounds up key operational information for the same audiences. Communities of practice – peer-led networks supported by the HR Division – are fostering professional and academic collaboration between colleagues involved in a range of academic and professional disciplines, such as teaching and learning, grants administration, postgraduate study and equality, diversity and inclusion, to a name a few.
The Council also agrees with Dr Plummer-Braeckman that Regents have a role to play in engaging with the mechanisms that currently exist. As described elsewhere in its response, Discussions are the primary way in which the Council and the General Board receive feedback, and the number of people engaging with them has been in slow but steady decline. Given that communication is both a dispersed activity, and an important professional attribute, the Council sees an opportunity for professional guidance and standards to be developed to encourage good communications practice.
The Staff Culture Survey was conducted in support of the University’s application in 2024 to renew its Athena SWAN award and its application in 2025 to renew its Race Equality Charter (REC) award. The Council welcomes the Board’s support for this important area of work, which demonstrates the University’s firm commitment to enabling gender and racial equality and inclusivity. The Council is pleased to report that the University was successful in achieving a renewal of its silver Athena SWAN award. The University was also informed on 4 February 2026 that it had successfully renewed its Bronze REC award.
The Council agrees that the results of the survey and supporting analyses should be easier for staff and students to access. This information will therefore be published separately in Lent Term 2026, together with the additional analyses undertaken in support of the REC application. The results have already been shared with institutions and discussed at various University committees, some of which included Trade Union colleagues and student representatives. The survey results directly informed the action plans underpinning the two charter applications and were subsequently published on the University’s Staff Hub in February 2025. Intersectional quantitative and qualitative analyses of the results at the University level were published as part of the Athena SWAN application. Recommendations for action arising from the survey can be found in the renewal applications.
Promoting a positive staff culture remains a key priority for the University, and the Council encourages all institutions to review their data to identify further action they can take locally to drive positive culture change.
The Council acknowledges that many members of staff are keen to see and support greater progress on operational environmental sustainability.
The Council agrees that responsibility for helping the University to achieve its sustainability ambitions sits across all parts of the University. Meeting commitments, including those set out in the Concordat for the Environmental Sustainability of Research and Innovation Practice, requires an institutional response. Central teams are responsible for leading key initiatives, for example those that require capital investment and policy interventions; however, individual members of staff also have an important part to play through the decisions and behaviours that they adopt in their daily working lives.
Resources and support are already in place to guide and support staff in this:
•The Environmental Sustainability Team (part of the Estates Division) provides tools, including Local Environmental Sustainability Plans, which enable Schools and departments to identify and address their most significant environmental impacts, and the Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework (LEAF), which guides lab managers and users in reducing the environmental impact of their work and helps to meet the requirements of funding bodies in this area. The Team also provides training for staff on operational environmental sustainability.
•Cambridge Zero delivers a strategic engagement programme to influence and inform climate and sustainability education within the University’s formal undergraduate and taught postgraduate curriculum.
•The Research Office has recently appointed a Sustainable Research Coordinator who will be working with the Environmental Sustainability Team to embed environmental considerations and guidance into the processes and procedures staff use when designing their research and developing funding applications.
The Council recognises that awareness and uptake of this support is variable across the University. It acknowledges the need to enhance communications to clarify the role of individual members of staff in meeting the University’s sustainability ambitions and the support that is available to them in this area.
The Council also recognises that Schools and departments across the University need to empower their staff to address sustainability through their daily activities. Individual initiatives by staff embedding environmental sustainability as part of their work are already starting to provide models of good practice.6
With reference to the Concordat for the Environmental Sustainability of Research and Innovation Practice, the Research Policy Committee has established the Sustainable Research Sub-Committee, whose terms of reference include responsibility for ‘helping to raise awareness amongst the University’s academic community of the University’s commitments in these areas and how research teams and individuals need to act to support these’. The Environmental Sustainability Team and the Research Office are supporting the Sustainable Research Sub-Committee with this.
The University already has the following budgets, which are dedicated to supporting work that improves its operational environmental performance:
•Carbon Reduction Fund: This funds projects and activities across the University that support delivery of the University’s Carbon Reduction Strategy.
•Travel Admin Fund: This supports sustainable transport initiatives across the University estate, including the Universal bus service.
•Environment Admin Fund: This supports activity in a number of areas, including biodiversity, waste reduction measures, environmental compliance, and staff engagement initiatives.
These budgets are managed by the Environmental Sustainability Team and overseen by the Environmental Sustainability Strategy Committee and its sub-committees.
The Council supports the recommendation that the outcomes delivered through these budgets are made more visible to the University community through annual reporting. This information will be published on the Environmental Sustainability Hub.7
In addition to these dedicated sustainability budgets, funding has been allocated in the Strategic Estates Capital Plan to support the delivery of decarbonisation measures through the Principal Programmes set out in the Strategic Estate Framework. The Estates Division is undertaking work to assess to what extent the available funding can support delivery against the University’s carbon reduction target for the estate (75% reduction on 2015–16 levels by 2030–31; zero carbon by 2048). Progress on delivering decarbonisation and broader environmental improvements through the Principal Programmes will form part of the standard governance and reporting processes for the Strategic Estate Framework.
The Council remains supportive of the Eunomia report recommendations and will provide an update on progress in implementing them in its next Annual Report. Nevertheless, in the current financial context, the Council recognises that finding funding for any new University activity will continue to be a challenge. This includes important work to realise the University’s environmental sustainability ambitions and strengthen governance and streamline related decision-making. It will be possible for some of that work to be implemented from existing resources or budgets, or by securing external funding. Where funding cannot be identified from such sources, the Planning and Resources Committee will continue to consider requests for new funding against other priorities under current procedures.
The Council notes the Board’s observations concerning the delayed delivery of myHR, and related comments from Professor Evans.
The implementation of myHR was being delivered under the HR Transformation Programme (HRTP). It was a fully integrated programme led by the UIS in collaboration with the HR Division, with the programme team comprising UIS, HR and Finance colleagues. It had operated very much as one team to plan and monitor delivery, and manage risks and issues.
The programme had a fully costed implementation plan and risk register. Risks relating to technical integration were identified from the start, documented on the HRTP risk register and regularly discussed at HRTP Board meetings. However, Systems Integration Testing in November 2024, to validate assumptions and inform full planning and delivery, exposed deeper structural incompatibilities that were not fully anticipated.
It is well documented that large technology programmes are hard to deliver. Planning complexity is increased when multiple platforms and integrations require concurrent replacement or change, which was the case concerning HRTP at the point the programme was paused.
The scale of integration challenges – particularly legacy dependencies – proved greater than anticipated despite mitigation strategies. When risks increased, or issues surfaced, these were made visible, and the programme team and the HRTP Board sought to address them.
The pause of HRTP allows the University to realign the technical approach and strategy, assess the transformation programmes’ governance structure and reduce the complexity of delivery – reducing risk/assumptions and concurrent delivery.
A new implementation date will be provided after a full review of dependencies and decisions required to inform the replanning of the myHR implementation has taken place. Given the priority of delivering the Finance Transformation Programme (FTP) and other work in the CPMB portfolio, a new target implementation date for myHR is expected to be confirmed in Michaelmas 2026, at the earliest.
The Council notes the comments from Dr Oliveira, which refer to matters that are the subject of ongoing procedures. It therefore does not consider it appropriate to comment on them at this time.
1See, for example, the reports of the Retirement Policy and EJRA Review Group and the Working Group on Investments in and Research Funded by Companies belonging to the Defence Industry (Reporter: 6741, 2023–24, p. 578; 6800, 2025–26, p. 56).
2The purpose of the Change Partners is to maintain a holistic view of all change affecting their institution and to advise on change matters at an organisational and local level. They bring a thorough understanding of stakeholder groups and can advise those leading programmes and other initiatives on pragmatic approaches to change.
3Including but not limited to the Vice-Chancellor, the Chief Financial Officer, the Chief Information Officer, the Pro-Vice-Chancellors and the Heads of the Schools.
4See https://universityofcambridgecloud.sharepoint.com/sites/UoC_EducationServicesProjectDeliveryTeam/SitePages/Teaching Review.aspx (University account required).
5See https://universityofcambridgecloud.sharepoint.com/sites/UoC_SupportingSupervisions (University account required).
6See the case studies highlighted on the Environmental Sustainability website: https://www.environment.admin.cam.ac.uk/news.
7Once available, the information will be published at https://universityofcambridgecloud.sharepoint.com/sites/UoC_EnvironmentalSustainability (University account required).
The University of Cambridge Students’ Union is a charitable company limited by guarantee. The Council approves changes to the Union’s Articles of Association, in accordance with the Council’s Code of Practice under Section 22 of the Education Act 1994.
In a referendum in February 2026, students voted in favour of changes to the Articles of the Union.1 Now that there are only five sabbatical officers, all of whom are trustees of the Union, one of the amendments to the Union’s Articles proposes that all sabbatical offices should be defined as major union offices and therefore elected in a secret ballot in which all members are entitled to vote, as required under Section 22(2)(d) of the Education Act 1994. Another amendment moves the definitions of Undergraduate Member and Postgraduate Member of the Union to the Union’s by-laws. The Council supports these and the other amendments to the Articles and is therefore submitting Graces (Graces 3 and 4, p. 384 and p. 385) to reflect these changes in Ordinances. If Grace 3 is approved, the Council will make the related change to the Code of Practice set out in Annex A below.
By amending paragraph 3(d) of the Code of Practice in respect of student unions issued under Section 22 of the Education Act 1994 (reproduced in Statutes and Ordinances, 2024, p. 184) to read as follows:
(d) Election to major union offices. The Act provides that appointment to major union offices should be by
election in a secret ballot in which all members are entitled to vote.
The Articles for the Union indicate that all sabbatical offices are to be
regarded as major union offices and require that election to these offices is by secret
ballot.
1The question asked was ‘Should the Students’ Union adopt the proposed Articles of Association?’. The motion was carried, with 1,460 students voting YES and 182 voting NO during the voting period from 23 to 26 February 2026.
The Council and the General Board have agreed that information about student prize-winners should no longer be compiled centrally and therefore lists of prize-winners will no longer be published in the Reporter. The lists covering prizes awarded in 2023–24 will therefore be the last to be published in the Reporter. The workload associated with gathering the information and confirming that individual students have consented to the publication of their names in line with the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation is significant and outweighs the benefit of maintaining a central record. The individual institutions that manage the prize funds will continue to award the prizes and record the names of prize-winners, publicising those names (should they choose) on their own websites only if the prize-winners have not opted out of having their names published.
The Council is submitting a Grace (Grace 5, p. 385) to remove the requirement to publish the names of the recipients from the Ordinance for the one prize fund that requires publication of those names.