Budget, Strategy, and Planning

For those of you who missed the most recent Faculty Forum [24/11/25], the key message was that we are striving to improve our financial position by $5m in the School of HASS, and $1m in the School of Education, by the end of 2028. There are two ways we can achieve that, by growing student load, and by reducing our costs.

To improve out student load, we begin by identifying areas where load growth is feasible, look for ways to enhance the visibility of our course offerings, and strive to reach accurate load forecasts for 2026. Those forecasts form the basis for our budget, both in terms of our anticipated income, and anticipated expenditure. We’ve then been working with UNE Marketing [who have been attending our Faculty Forums, and who now regularly attend Faculty Executive Committee meetings] to develop more refined and targeted strategies to attract students. As of the time of writing, we’ve seen an increase in direct applications to HASSE T1 2026 courses by 5% in HASS, and 1% in Education. Critically also, the work undertaken in the Student Experience Portfolio over the last twelve months to improve response times to student applications means that UNE as a whole has seen a 6.5% improvement on its rate of converting applications to enrolments compared to what was budgeted. As I’ve previously discussed at Faculty Forums, this means that we’re actively converting more applications into actual enrolments, which is a big win for all faculties! Efforts are also underway to offer several of our courses as ‘Offshore Online Offerings’, which we hope will enhance our international student numbers. While we’ve seen some initial uptake, we expect the biggest movement in this area to take place mid-late 2026.

Coupled with this, we need to think about how to deliver our courses in a more affordable manner. The Unit Workload Planner can be downloaded at the link here. As I’ve previously reported, this is a tool that is designed to help all staff plan their workloads. It does not replace WAMS, and it is not designed to be a source of truth for your workload allocations. That said, it should provide some indication of future workloads, and work associated with units. This information is important to help you plan, and it’s important to help us resource future work by combining this information with the planned Unit Schedule. The unit schedule [which is still in development] will list all units that we offer across each school, and outline the schedule of offerings for the next three years. The offerings will provide an estimate of the student load, the workload hours required to run that unit, and who the nominal Unit Coordinator is. While all of the information entered there is subject to change, it at least provides some foundation upon which to build some detailed discussions about workload and staffing requirements.

In order to reduce our costs, I proposed a number of immediate steps. Further steps are being explored, and I would like to open the subject up to further discussions and contributions. The Blue Sky Thinking forums that I’ve been running throughout the year are designed to explore ‘out of the box’ and innovative thinking, but you don’t have to wait for the next forum! I’d encourage everyone to reach out at any time, and I reiterate the availability of the Concept Brief if there are any important ideas you’d like to pitch! The Concept Brief can be found at this link, and a reminder that submissions are reviewed at each Faculty Executive Committee meeting [held every second Tuesday].

Finally, as we’re now in December, I want to wish everyone a happy holiday season! I encourage you all to take a good break if you can, and I look forward to working with you all in 2026!