Education Inspectorate’s reaction to Plan for Change
This week, the Education Inspectorate shared its findings on TU Delft's social safety improvement plan: the Plan for Change. In its findings, the inspectorate is very critical on many points – about the content, but also about us as an Executive Board. This is painful and disappointing, but also understandable and something for which we take personal responsibility. After all, we are, and feel, fully responsible for the well-being of our colleagues, staff and students. We are not proud of the false start we made in our initial response to the Inspectorate report. We want to demonstrate to the inspectorate, and more importantly to our TU Delft community, that we fully recognise this and have learnt the necessary lessons.
However critical the Inspectorate’s reaction may be, we have every confidence in the changes that we, as an organisation, have embarked upon together. Over the past few months, we have engaged in an intensive process with our TU Delft community to try to come up with a (first) improvement plan. It has been a process of many conversations, emotions, hopes and a lot of good input. On 15 May, it resulted in a shared Plan for Change – which will be developed into an action plan that sets us the essential task of delivering the culture change we want. And to ensure that the care of our staff and students is restored.
We also understand that the Inspectorate is assessing our Plan for Change as an action plan and is asking us to develop more concrete and SMART actions. This is something we are working on, so we take this finding very much to heart. The inspectorate also wants to know how the proposed actions will demonstrably lead to improvements in social safety. This, too, is currently being worked out: how to keep a finger on the pulse and make the effects measurable.
A journey of change takes time and continuous attention. It is a long-term process to which we are collectively committed. We listen to what the Inspectorate says and, however critical, we see it as an encouragement to continue the path we are on. This requires trust.
We recognise that in recent years we have not always responded adequately or correctly to signals of social unsafety within the organisation. People have suffered and we take this very much to heart. There has been a loss of confidence, including from the Inspectorate. We will do everything in our power to regain that trust so that we can build the kind of organisation that we want to be for everyone: courageous, open and safe. We are deeply motivated to successfully anchor the change process we have started together with our community in our organisation. To this end, we are asking the Inspectorate to give us the time and space to prove that we can do this.
The Inspectorate expresses its appreciation for the process that the TU Delft community has embarked on together, and for the dedication and commitment of staff and students to the well-being of our university. We fully agree with this finding. For this, our sincere thanks go to all those colleagues, staff, students, deans and directors, alumni, as well as the Works and Student councils, who show and feel a shared commitment to the wellbeing of our university.
The Inspectorate's advice motivates us as an Executive Board, but also our Deans and Directors, to continue this important process of change, so that together with our staff, students and alumni, we can become a top university in this area too.