Family Care
The University provides staff with a variety of family care leave depending on your needs and links to these have been provided to the right.
Should you need to take any type of leave, other than annual leave, please contact your HR Coordinator in the first instance.
Flexible working
We are happy to support flexible working arrangements wherever possible, in keeping with the University’s Flexible Working Policy. This includes flexibility to working times, starting earlier or later in the day, and working from home for part of the week where this can be accommodated in your role. Staff wanting to work flexibly in this way should agree to a fixed pattern with their line manager. For contractual changes such as reducing hours or condensing work days, the department HR team must be consulted.
Please note, we feel it is important for our department culture that all staff spend part of their working week in the office. Working from home full-time is discouraged and should not be used to cover long term childcare arrangements.
Child-friendly areas
Supervised children are welcome into the tea room and office spaces (unfortunately not lab spaces due to health and safety).
Roving Researcher Scheme
The Roving Researcher Pilot Scheme in the School of Biological Sciences aims to mitigate the impact of medium- or long-term leave on our researchers and their scientific programmes. This innovative scheme provides experiment support (or other types of support, for example, to help Principal Investigators on leave with lab management) to scientists on leave, enabling research momentum to continue in the lab. Feedback from a colleague who has taken up this scheme:
"I knew I was coming back off leave part time initially and going straight into a really intensive teaching term. Normally these things would mean that I would do essentially no wet lab research for the first three months of my return to work. Instead, with the RR I have been able to complete revisions on a paper, submit a conference abstract with the RR as an author (accepted for a talk in the spring), complete the experiments for a further paper and generate pilot data for an upcoming grant submission. This is a huge improvement over where I expected to be. Having someone to prepare, start or finish experiments if I have to leave a short notice makes so much more possible."
