Update on social safety from dean and department chairs

The attention devoted to the inappropriate behaviour of a lecturer from our Faculty has stirred up lots of reactions in the past week. To begin with, we want to emphasise that a safe study environment for students is of the utmost important to us; we are very sorry that we have not been able to offer that safe environment to these students from the Conservation and Restoration programme. There has been a lot of anger about the events and rightly so. It has also become clear that as an organisation we need to be better equipped to offer students a safe study environment, and that the procedures in place, in the event that this goes totally wrong, need to be more easily accessible. It is good that we are facing up to that; this is the first step towards being able to improve this. At the same time, there has been substantial engagement with this subject from the entire Faculty community and there are many ideas about how we can increase social safety. This week, we had various discussions with students and staff from the degree programme and the Faculty.