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Enhancing Family Friendly Practices at QM

At Queen Mary we are looking to enhance our family friendly practices to better support parents and carers across the institution.

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This is an important part of our Gender Impact Plan as well as our wider mission to be the most inclusive university of our kind, anywhere.

In October we undertook a workshop bringing together HR colleagues, Heads of Schools and School Managers, wider key stakeholders and representatives from our parents and carers network. This workshop provided insights to inform how we can enhance our family friendly practices and identified specific recommendations to progress this work.

A key learning from this session was recognising the specific and varied challenges faced by academic staff across the career pipeline around parental leave. Key themes that arose were:

  • QM’s current parental leave scheme’s eligibility criteria (1 years’ service) can create barriers, most notably for staff on fixed-term or temporary contracts, as well as for some grant-funded staff and those working across/between NHS and QM contracts
  • Lack of consistent cover for maternity leave in teaching and research roles
  • Specific challenges around paid parental leave for those on grant funded contracts, and wider career progression following leave
  • The need for enhanced support for returners from parental leave to catch up on research and support for career progression

The next step in this work is to further understand these issues and to identify policy developments and initiatives to address these specific challenges. We are therefore holding a series of focus groups in January and February 2023 for specific academic staff groups to share their feedback and recommendations.

These sessions are open to staff who have taken parental leave within the last 5 years as well as staff with responsibility for supporting parents, such as Heads of School, EDI Leads and Principle Investigators.

  • Session One – Teaching and Research Staff (including clinical academics)
    Wednesday 25 January, 10:00 – 11:00 (Laws Building, 308-B)
  • Session Two – Research only staff (e.g., Post-Docs and Early Career Researchers)
    Wednesday 1 February, 10:30 – 11:30 (Bancroft Building, 3.18)
  • Session Three – Teaching & Scholarship, Teaching & Professional Practice
    Wednesday 8 February, 11:00 – 12:00 (Queens Building, QB-211)

    Please sign up to the session which best reflects your role.

If you are interested in attending one of these sessions, please email hr-equality@qmul.ac.uk  Please state in your email which session you are signing up to.

We also recognise the need to consider the specific challenges faced by postgraduate research students in relation to parental leave and caring responsibilities. We will therefore also be holding focus groups specifically for postgraduate research students. This session will be open to any PGRs as well as staff with the responsibility of supporting PGR students, for example PhD Supervisors. More information will be circulated in due course.

Please contact Liz Grand l.grand@qmul.ac.uk if you have any questions.

 

 

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