Planning Office

Each College has a Planning Partner who shares their time between the College and the central Planning Office. The Planning Partner is the lead academic planning support for the College. As well as supporting central policy analysis and horizon scanning, the Planning Partners’ role is to help Colleges define strategic plans and priorities, which support delivery of the University’s Strategic Framework.

This engages the Planning Partners in a broad range of activities including:

• Working with Colleges to prepare and monitor performance against the annual College Compact (an articulation of a College’s strategic priorities and targets, aligned with the broader University Strategic Framework and Key Performance Indicators)
• Monitoring and reporting on associated risks
• Sourcing, analysing and interpreting data to support College decision making
• Producing policy papers and reports to support strategic decision making, at College or University level
• Undertaking environment scanning and scenario planning to inform the development of long term strategies
• Assisting with the development of business proposals in support of institutional priorities
• Supporting and/or participating in reviews
• Providing informed and constructive challenge and advice on College plans – including new programme proposals

College of Medical and Dental Science and Head of College Planning Partners

Katy Holmes
Email: k.m.holmes@bham.ac.uk

College of Arts and Law

Victoria Houghton
Email: v.houghton@bham.ac.uk

College of Engineering and Physical Sciences

Rebecca Tringham
Email: r.tringham@bham.ac.uk

College of Life and Environmental Sciences

Neil McDonald
Email:  n.m.mcdonald@bham.ac.uk  

College of Social Sciences 

Lindsey Wright 
Email: l.d.wright@bham.ac.uk

The Global and Periodic Strategic Reviews are strategic and integrated peer review, providing a picture of the performance of a whole School/Institute or Professional Service and its contribution to enhancing the University’s performance in line with the Strategic Framework.

For Schools it encompasses an overview of teaching quality; research quality; market demand; external and internal future challenges; structure and processes; people and resources; and strategic integration.The Integrated Strategic Reviews replace the School Quality Review (SQR), Comprehensive Programme Review (CPR) and Strategic Research Review (SRR). It forms the cornerstone of the University’s periodic review of learning and teaching, building on annual review.

A key element of School Reviews being the detailed scrutiny of education issues through a range of performance data and information relating to education.For Professional Services, the Review considers issues of Service structure and staffing, plus resilience and future-proofing, benchmarks against other Universities or sectors, identifies opportunities for income generation or efficiencies and makes recommendations for improvements or enhancements.

Critically, given the wide scope of the review process, each individual review will focus on key priority areas identified through discussions with the School/Service, College, University Senior Management and Panel Chair.

Senior Planning Partner – Strategic Reviews

Claire Bonnet
Email: C.S.Bonnet@bham.ac.uk 

The Performance and Insight Team provide a business analysis and data analytics function across a broad range of areas including students, staff, research and finance. Our analysis generates insight and management information on internal and external data, and supports policy advice on how the University will be viewed through these different lenses.

The team leads on Business Intelligence, and the University’s implementation of Tableau, the data visualization tool. The team also collaborates on the development of the data warehouse with the Business Intelligence team in IT Services.

The Performance and Insight Team's specific tasks include:

• Student number target setting, population forecasting
• Forecasting tuition fee income
• Leading on the preparation and analysis of Employability data
• League Table monitoring, analysis, interpretation, and input
• Preparation of the Staff return to HESA, as well as co-ordinating the provision of  the Management Information Units (MIU) and its relationship with external coding systems such as HESA cost centres, HECoS and JACS
• Developing and maintaining the institutional KPIs, and dashboards to support processes such as Compact
• Prioritisation of BI development activities, defining requirements and providing key management information
• Being expert users of Tableau, promoting the effective usage of Tableau across the University
• Provision of systems administration, structure and online training for Tableau Server; best practice guidance and data source management for Tableau Desktop
• Proving insight and analysis into Research metrics and citations.

Team email: performance-insight@contacts.bham.ac.uk

Interim Line Manager

Dave Radcliffe
Email: d.s.radcliffe@bham.ac.uk

Planning Officers

Mark Clayton
Email: m.clayton.1@bham.ac.uk

Tony Potter
Email: a.m.potter@bham.ac.uk

Business Intelligence Analyst

Jon Fox
Email: j.c.fox@bham.ac.uk

Data Analyst

Charlotte Atkin
Email: c.e.atkin.2@bham.ac.uk

The Data Management function within Strategic Planning works across the University to promote good practice in data management. This includes the following activities:

• Convening the Data Owner and Data Stewards Community of Practice
• Working with Legal Services and IT Services on managing and monitoring GDPR compliance
• Acting as Secretary to the University’s Data Management Group
• Liaising with University project teams on how to make data management a first principle within their work
• Working with the BI teams in Planning and IT Services to manage the pipeline of reporting needs
• Convening the national HE Data Governance Network and speaking at events on its behalf and that of the University.

Head of Data Management

Helen Butler
Email: h.j.e.butler@bham.ac.uk  

The University is increasingly subject to greater levels of regulation, and policy intervention. So this function works to help influence external policy as it relates to the funding and regulation of the University, and then to ensure that the University is responding to the policy as it is being implemented. For example leading on the TEF subject pilots, to ensure the final TEF subject process is better than if it had been implemented without our involvement. Other specific activities include:

• Oversight and co-ordination of our major HESA returns (Staff, Student, Finance)
• External returns to OfS (HESES, MDS)
• Monitoring teaching and research income from OfS and Research England, and helping allocate these for TRAC purposes
• Regulatory data – TEF and TEF subject data, Access & Participation Plan data, and the Transparency Condition data
• Co-ordinating the External Policy Network

Head of Policy, Funding & Regulation

Dave Radcliffe
Email: d.s.radcliffe@bham.ac.uk