Professor Maggie Cusack:

The Deputy has posed a number of questions and I will respond to them in the order in which they were asked. The value for money is an issue we have already touched on. It is a really important point. I think we are providing incredible value for money but there is a cost there in terms of staff time and effort to deliver real quality in the context of the learner's experience. We have set ambitious challenges as a technological university in terms of upscaling the research and innovation. It is clear that more funding is required in the system for us to achieve all of the ambitions that we are keen to achieve.

On the memorandums of understanding and working through them, we are doing exactly that. We are working through them and addressing all of the points. We are working hard to bring everybody with us to realise the ambitions we want to deliver.

The question of contracts was raised. I was asked in general terms about the challenges that we may see in technological universities and lessons that others could learn. There will be opportunities for professional management and support staff. Hopefully there will be career opportunities for them as we develop a different type of organisation with different endeavours or additional endeavours and priorities.

The development of an academic employment framework is important for the technological universities. There is a point about contracts with researchers and this is an integral part of it. We are helping to support and develop early career colleagues in all aspects of academic endeavour, including learning and teaching, their own research and how they interact with industry and companies. The idea is to have all those aspects strongly all the way through. That is a really essential point to realise the full potential of staff. We all agree there is an extraordinary amount of exciting potential. That is certainly one of the steps that would really help us to achieve this.

There are other points around digital infrastructure. We heard mention of the technological university research network report earlier. The primary recommendation is about having outstanding digital infrastructure. We spoke about learning from Covid-19. We have learned many lessons from what can be done there. This has been a real opportunity for us to do things even better in terms of other teaching, how we engage and do research, interacting with companies and how we can do things in a virtual way to great effect.