Celebrating University of the Year

Dear Colleagues

As you are aware, we were this year awarded the accolade of The Sunday Times and Times University of the Year 2013-14. This is a wonderful achievement that recognises a huge team effort and demonstrates how the way we do things at Birmingham is being noticed and celebrated.

Our bold vision, the quality of what we do, our innovative approaches, and our improved performance on key measures of education, research, and graduate employability were instrumental in the decision to select Birmingham as University of the Year 2013-14. This accolade recognised not only our improvement in virtually every league table but our innovative approach to recruitment through our unconditional offer strategy. The University was also complimented on other sector-leading initiatives such as our Birmingham Fellows Scheme, the Birmingham Professional Programme, and our impressive graduate employability figures, to name just a few.

None of this has come easily and I would like to thank all of you again for your continued commitment, dedication and role in our shared success.

As such, I have been considering ways in which we could celebrate our University of the Year status and say thank you for your hard work in helping us to achieve this award. We would like to mark this achievement by giving all staff an extra day's leave on Tuesday 26 August 2014 (i.e. the day after August bank holiday). This means we will close the University for that day. For those of you that have already booked holiday then, or those that have to work to keep operations running, you can take the extra day's leave at another time to be agreed with your line manager.

I would like to thank every member of our University community for their individual and combined endeavours that have contributed to our success.

Best wishes
David Eastwood

Professor David Eastwood
Vice-Chancellor
University of Birmingham