Staff to vote on future of Open University leader

Peter Horrocks, the vice-chancellor of The Open University, may face a motion of no confidence on 5 April following sustained criticism of his strategy.

Open University staff have been summoned to an emergency meeting this week to discuss Horrocks’s future, according to an announcement by the University and College Union on 29 March.

Horrocks, who has led The Open University since May 2015, told parliament earlier this year that his university would be undertaking “the biggest restructuring exercise in the history of British higher education” as a result of a decline in student numbers. The reforms, which involve a shift from face-to-face to online teaching, have been criticised on the grounds that they will reduce student support and require a significant number of redundancies.