per night. Free meals, cheapest coffee in town. The Big Deal providing over £200 of free cultural, sporting and development events per month. Compressed timetables. Flexible delivery. Onsite recruitment agency for part time work, including on campus.
Identify a need, meet it. That’s it.
Meet the specific needs of students. That’s what drives us daily at BNU.
The needs of students who have to work long hours, who have caring responsibilities, studying in a cost of living crisis.
Commuter kitchens at all campuses. Bringing a GP surgery on campus. Commuter accommodation at £35 1/
Universities don’t just reflect inequality, they can reinforce or interrupt it. The real question for leaders is whether access remains a core value or a convenient casualty.
the ‘need more trades’ narratives (but for other people’s kids, naturally).
Sudden concern for the loan book, access work treated as reputational drag, schools of privilege targeted for recruitment. Marketing and pronouncements and interviews that code prestige, not impact.
2/
Elitism in higher education never went away but it’s becoming more acceptable again.
As competition intensifies, some universities are quietly rediscovering the comfort of exclusivity.
We see it in the silent acquiescence to the Mickey Mouse narratives, the ‘too many students’ narratives, 1/
Agreed, seen it many times. For me that indicates an absence leadership talent
The majority of organisational problems are caused by a lack of talent.
And the majority of organisational problems can be solved by a density of talent.
Recruiting, developing and retaining talent should be our preoccupation.
paid internships must be the norm, transparently advertised and properly enforced.
Opportunity shouldn’t depend on your parents’ bank balance. www.suttontrust.com/news-opinion...
with financial backing and insider networks over those with talent and potential.
We know internships are a key route into many professions. When access depends on who can afford to work for free, that isn’t meritocracy, it’s structural advantage.
If we’re serious about social mobility, 2/
The government’s response on unpaid internships is welcome but it must lead to real change.
As the Sutton has pointed out below, unpaid and unadvertised internships remain a significant barrier to opportunity. They privilege those with financial backing and insider networks over those 1/
a promotion. When you see people develop. When you see small kindnesses. When you upset the right people. When people do the things others said they could not.
Then. Then there is nothing like education. Nothing.
bureaucracy, egos to endure, politics to endure.
But when it’s right. When it clicks. When learning happens, when people flourish. When students cross the graduation stage. When solutions are found and thinking is collective and innovation sparks. When a student gets it. When a colleague gets 2/
I’ve worked in education for 26 years, half my life. And I’ve never regretted it once. Education can be maddening, wildly frustrating, exhausting mentally, physically and emotionally. There are times of grind, times of counting the days until holiday, times of boring meetings and pointless 1/
where the community is always welcome.
This is how we do estates. www.bucks.ac.uk/news/bnu-com...
neighbourhood. A space where the learning is more important than winning architectural prizes. Where students are more important than vanity. Where we can grow into other buildings and keep a vital location vitalised. A re-purposed, re-imagined campus building on a legacy of community learning 2/
So we’ve bought the old Uxbridge Library as the base for our new West London site. Right on the high street, 2 minutes from the Tube. No expensive new build, paid off in saved rent in 7 years. A space where we can create a centre of innovation in practice-based education at the heart of the 1/
roles, even when they have similar qualifications and apply in the same numbers.
This isn’t about aspiration or talent. It’s about discrimination in the workplace. Higher education has widened access. But if the labour market doesn’t change, we risk creating access without mobility.
Universities are held to account for the percentage of their students who achieve ‘graduate outcomes’. Yet here is more evidence below that graduates from lower socio-economic backgrounds, particularly those who are Black and Asian, are significantly less likely to secure entry-level professional 1/
Universities are complex. Strategy should be simple:
1. Identify the problems
2. Outline how you’ll solve them
3. Create clear, measurable actions and provide the support and resources to achieve them
That’s it.
co-created, processes rethought, spending adjusted, resources increased, solutions found.
At an organisational level, it means our forthcoming strategy has been infused with insights you can’t gain from the C suite. On a personal level it’s been the best learning of my career.
In the last year, I’ve done over 50 ‘back to the floor’ meetings, spending time with professional service and academic teams talking about the day to day reality of BNU.
I’ve been proved wrong, been corrected, had my mind changed, been encouraged to think differently. Strategy has been 1/
We’re now recruiting for a Chief Finance Officer to join BNU. Great opportunity to join the best exec team I’ve worked with, reshares appreciated.
jobs.bucks.ac.uk/vacancy/chie...
from graduates. The doctors, nurses and paramedics. The social workers, engineers and teachers. The artists and the performers, the philosophers and historians and mathematicians. All benefitting the UK.
Higher education is a social, as well as personal, good.
Graduates benefit personally from higher education. They earn more. They gain more. The constant refrains in the discussions around student loans. And of course it’s true.
But any good-faith consideration of the student loan system must equally foreground that the country benefits from 1/
We’re recruiting for a Head of Registry Operations, a key role in reshaping how we do things. Reshares appreciated.
jobs.bucks.ac.uk/vacancy/head...
When people feel that they won’t be supported if they challenge misbehaviour, when there is a belief that complaints won’t be taken seriously and nothing will be done, that’s more than a problem with individuals; that’s a problem with organisational culture.
Whenever there is organisational misbehaviour, there is someone who excused it. It’s banter. Or they grew up in a different era. Or people are just too sensitive. Or they really didn’t mean it like that. Or that’s just how they are and you should just ignore it.
1/
If the sector is serious about student success, it has to get serious about staff wellbeing. Rest isn’t a perk, it’s an essential.
This year we closed BNU for two weeks at Christmas as a thank you to everyone who worked so hard to achieve so much.
The feedback was clear. People came back better, fresher, more connected with family, more energised for the year ahead.
So we’re doing it every year.
1/
reaches saturation. The qualitative coding that occurs by habit during discussion. The discernment in interrogation of data. Approaching every problem as a grounded theory study, building from data.
Research is a mind set for leaders.
