Speakers
Presentation
In Michael Fullan’s 2001 publication Leading in a Culture of Change, he wrote that leaders in education settings should simultaneously be on the dance floor and the balcony. This can be hard when leading services includes such pressing challenges. This interactive presentation explores the tension between day-to-day leadership (the dancefloor) and working strategically (on the balcony). This keynote focuses on ‘influencing’ – especially senior teams, governing boards and governments at a particularly complex and perilous time for UK universities and those who work in them.
Drawing on her own career experience moving from lecturing to ‘third space’ professional, and into senior management, Julie explores how leaders might take responsibility for influence and facilitate open spaces for it in universities, so that important signals from Student Services can drive change at pace.
Given governments’ policy changes and different approaches across the UK nations and regions, Julie also reaches beyond universities to consider how best to maximise boundary encounters with key civil servants and politicians. Importantly, this presentation sets out what’s needed to address pressing policy issues impacting on Student Services, wherever people are situated.
This keynote references the challenge set out in Julie’s chapter in The Impact of the Integrated-Practitioner in Higher Education 2023.
Julie joined London Metropolitan University as Vice Chancellor in August 2024, after two years as Deputy Vice Chancellor. The university educates over 25,000 students, including students who study overseas, and employs just over 1,000 people. Previously, she was Deputy Vice Chancellor at Solent University Southampton and before that Pro Vice-Chancellor equivalent at Roehampton University. Her early career was spent in London, lecturing at various providers and as an active campaigner, including working on a book in 2004 called Tell it Like it Is that was supported by Doreen Lawrence. 34 years after Grenadian scholar Bernard Coard caused a social and political storm in his seminal study that exposed the plight of Black children in the education system, and kick-started many of the anti-racist and multi-cultural policies of the 1970s and 80s, Tell it Like It Is brought the debate firmly into the 21st century. She is a Professor of Higher Education, a Senior Fellow of the Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA), a Principal Fellow of Advance HE and a National Teaching Fellow.
Professor Hall has written extensively on working with students as partners in learning and has advised universities in the UK and in Europe, Japan, the Caribbean and the Lebanon. She has acted as an expert witness to parliamentary commissions on teaching quality, as chair of SEDA, and has sat on the boards of further education colleges, school trusts, cultural organisations and hospitals during a long career with a commitment to improving life chances through education. This is in part because she didn’t take a straight path into academia. The first in her family to enter higher education, using the clearing route when she changed her mind about her degree subject, taking a masters degree while working, encouraged by her parents and inspired by her grandmother who was a cleaner at Birmingham University.
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https://www.londonmet.ac.uk/profiles/staff/julie-hall/
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professor-julie-hall-67b55812/