Dear Colleagues
You will have received the Communications message: covid update from Parveen and Paul over the weekend, but I wanted to follow up with what I hope are some further reassuring words.
Although we await official guidance from the Department for Education, MRT met this morning and UEB are meeting shortly and it looks to me like very little will change for teams within Student Services. While the University remains open and students are encouraged to be here we will need to maintain a staff presence for most if not all teams that are currently present on campus. We already have only a very limited number of people in offices at one time.
All Universities up and down the country are discussing their balance between face-to-face and online teaching for the rest of the term, and given that the picture at Reading and nationally is that students are very much appreciating their f2f teaching and that university teaching has not been found to be a context for virus transmission it seems highly likely that we will be doing all we can to maintain the current balance.
You will have seen that the University has launched a Covid Support Line to deal with queries from staff, students, parents and the public. The plan is for this Support line to be the front line in dealing with queries and any specialist queries will be referenced to other teams as needed (e.g. HR, SCs, International Advisory, Covid Support & Behaviour, Welfare, Halls etc etc.).
I expect there will be some changes on campus. Any of you who are members of the Sportspark will probably already have head from them as sport will be hard hit by this lockdown, and the number of catering outlets on campus will likely reduce and will only be open for takeaways.
You will receive much more detail in the next few days and confirmation (or otherwise) of what I have outlined above, but I just wanted to give you a bit of an insight for now.
Do let me know if you have any very specific questions about your team or about specific activities scheduled between now and the end of term that may be impacted.
Best wishes
Paddy