Looking ahead to the next academic year

Dear students,

I hope you are well and wish you every success in your remaining online examinations and assessments.

In these uncertain times, your continued dedication and hard work is inspiring, and all of us at the University are immensely proud of you.

While you are managing this term at home in lockdown conditions, we are working hard to prepare the new academic year for you and to answer the many questions you will have about what your teaching, accommodation and campus experience will be like and how we will assure your safety.

I am writing to provide answers to some of those questions now, and we will provide you with specific arrangements for your course, accommodation, when and how you should arrive on campus, visas and other essentials in early June.

For many postgraduates, our new academic year will start, as planned, on 21 September 2020. Our campuses will be open and - following all national safety guidelines - we look forward to welcoming you back to our community here in Nottingham. A number of postgraduate courses may commence later than this date, in October 2020 or January 2021, and we will confirm these by w/c 8 June.

Of course, life at university, as much as everywhere else around the globe, will feel different for a while, and so I want to reassure you that your experience as a student at Nottingham will be safe, enriching and exciting. Uniquely for a UK university, we have already reopened and welcomed more than 5,000 students back to our campus in Ningbo, China and we are using that experience to inform how we approach things in the UK.

As always, Nottingham will give you an outstanding education and student experience. Many of our programmes are taught through small-group settings such as seminars, laboratory classes and tutorials. We will continue to teach these in person, while following any national safety guidelines in place at the time, to ensure you have every opportunity to engage with our world-leading academics and your peers.

Some of our larger-scale lectures may need to be delivered differently, for example through guided learning, deploying educational technologies or in interactive sessions with lecturers, but in all circumstances you can be assured of the highest quality teaching.

To reassure you and protect your health, social distancing measures will be in place across our buildings, accommodation and public spaces alongside the dedicated entrances, one-way systems and distance markers that have become a familiar feature in other areas of national life.

We are also working with the Students’ Union to make sure that your student experience at

Nottingham will remain unrivalled. Our award-winning campuses will provide leisure, training and sporting pursuits, and activities provided by halls and student societies, volunteering and other opportunities will help you build a unique experience and settle back into campus life.

I hope that you find this information reassuring and will join me in thanking the many colleagues across the University who are working intensively so that we can commence our new academic year in person, in safety and in the spirit of community that makes Nottingham so special.

Please continue to follow the latest information and updates on our webpages and we will contact you again to provide you with more detail on our planning in June. In the meantime, I wish you all good health and every success in your assessments.