Welcome back! - Björn Berggren on what's happening this Autumn

How does it feel to be back after the summer holidays?

It's great to be back on campus! I like the beginning of the autumn term, it always feels like a fresh start! This year we have several new roles of responsibility and new organisational forms that have been introduced or are in the pipeline, and generally a lot of new and exciting things going on! Things are happening at KTH! It's great to meet colleagues again and all the new students. We are fortunate to have extremely competent staff and I look forward to continuing our joint work for ABE and KTH.

The Faculty Board has been in place for a semester now, how is it working?

Very well! We are developing the forms of the board's role and responsibilities step by step together to ensure that the new organisation is integrated in the best possible way into the organisation. The Faculty Board now has overall responsibility within the school for monitoring and developing the quality of education within the framework of KTH's quality system. In the spring, a working group was coordinated to investigate the Board's internal organisation regarding educational issues. This has now led to concrete changes in the education organisation going forward. Just before the summer, it was decided to revise the rules of procedure and delegation, which means, among other things, that an undergraduate education committee and a doctoral education committee will be established under the Faculty Board in addition to the quality councils and programme councils for our educational programmes.

The idea of the new committees is to relieve the Faculty Board and provide recommendations for decisions. Within the School, quality work is coordinated in independent quality councils for first and second cycle programmes, and doctoral programmes, led by the head of first cycle and doctoral programmes respectively. In addition, each programme should have a programme council led by the programme director. The aim of the new organisation is to ensure that quality issues are dealt with on a collegial basis, as close to the programme as possible. ‘Programme councils are very important, especially when it comes to student influence. The aim is for students to be represented in all of councils and be involved in influencing the issues that are closest to their everyday lives. 

There is a lot going on in the educational organisation, can you tell us more?

Indeed! We have a new Deputy Director of first and second cycle education coming in this autumn, who will be tasked with reviewing the School's educational programmes, which will take a couple of years and involve many of those working in first and second cycle education. At the school, we have also recently established a common function description for directors of studies, with the aim of both clarifying the tasks and responsibilities of the director of studies versus, for example, the programme director, and to increase quality assurance. The ABE School is also investing heavily in contract education. I have just learnt that our new contract training initiative for Real Estate Agents in collaboration with FEI already has over 40 registered participants! In general, our programmes are doing very well. KTH has received more international students this year than before. It is clear that we have an extremely good reputation in the world. We should be very proud of that.

KTH is working towards a balanced economy by 2026, how is this reflected in the school's work?

‘In concrete terms, we are continuing to review the school's finances, both as a whole and for individual units, and trying to think in new ways, for example in terms of premises and other costs. We also work in a different way with first and second cycle finances today than in the past. The fact that we now work on the basis of ceiling amounts makes both the performance and the planning of education much more important. We have the help of both our new school controller Ulf Arvidsson and a number of GRU controllers under the leadership of Tiina Vinter, who is responsible for the education administration function (UA).

We feel it is important to increase transparency about how the university's finances actually work and why they work the way they do. To achieve this, we will, among other things, conduct a meeting with the entire faculty on how the finances are managed. Often, we are governed by legal requirements, not internal KTH decisions.

What else is happening at the ABE School?

We continue to have a strong focus on gender equality, diversity and equal treatment (JML). For example, the results of the survey on academic housework will be presented at the Leaders' Forum in September. We also continue to develop the skills of staff on JML issues, for example, we are running a gender-awareness leadership training course for the School's first and second cycle programme managers together with the ITM School. Our previous initiative to recruit more female visiting professors is also continuing and we actually have several arriving this autumn, which feels great!