Our immense gratitude to everyone that helped us kick off our newest event The AUDE Showcase - including the excellent team at Nottingham Venues and indeed to all at the University of Nottingham for making us so welcome. This is a new format for us giving an opportunity for AUDE members to hear more about the major challenges we all face and to get a sense from AUDE's subject leads on the projects we are currently working on via a series of workshops.
Diana Beech and Lewis Cooper for leading our plenary session 'System Reboot' in which we've looked at shifting policy on all of tertiary education, driven in part by a new government, but also by demographic change, and changing student expectation among other things. HE can be assertive about its ability to contribute to new missions around public health and wellbeing, safer streets and community cohesion, leadership of the green transition, regional economic growth, and opportunity for all. Estates teams need to be ever better at 'sweating the assets'. Lifelong learning means our estates need to be dynamic and able to shift to involve and inspire the 18 year old undergraduate, but also the 30 or 40 years old looking for CPD. What is on the cards in case of rationalisation of estates, or centralisation of back office functions? How do we manage the impact on staff and students, and including around wellbeing?
Thank you to all of the leads of our special interest groups who explained more about their work and specialist activities at the event. In all cases these groups are here to help you with deep dives into their specialisms, and they are keen to meet with you if you'd like to contribute to AUDE's work in these areas. We heard of many great projects in progress, including our Strategic FM Group's upcoming benchmarking survey on cleaning which will be coming this autumn; the Capital Group's Capital Costs Database which will shortly be renewed and provided on the AUDE platform for access to all; and our Sustainability Advisory Group's new Decarbonisation Guide which published recently and is available from the AUDE website. In all cases the message is 'Get involved'.
A special mention to our supporters for this event - Bond Bryan, Helvar and all our exhibitors without your support this event could not happen.
Thanks for your engagement, and we look forward to seeing you at our next event.
The AUDE Showcase will be CPD accredited.
