Thursday 15 October 2015

Final talks - funding and student engagement

Some of the other sessions at the Higher and Further Education show included:

A talk from the Director of Finance from HEFCE about how the funding environment has changed. You can see from this slide how the funding distributed by HECE has decreased, and how for the first time in 2015/16 they are distributing more research funding than teaching funding. 


A session from the Chair of AUDE (Association of University Estates Directors) about how we have to deliver more value from our estate. Our estate is very big, and very costly so we have to drive as much value out of it as we can, by using as efficiently as possible, and looking for commercial opportunities.

An excellent talk from our own Deputy Vice Chancellor Shearer West, after only 6 weeks in post, on some of our excellent initiatives in student engagement. These included the  #weareinternational campaign run jointly with our Student Union to raise the profile of what it meant to be a global university which now has over 100 universities supporting it. She also talked about our advanced apprenticeship scheme, SURE which provides research experience for undergraduates, and of course, the concept of the Sheffield Graduate. Good to see the Diamond get a mention too!

The closing keynote was David Willets, the former Minister for Universities and Science on the funding of university education - who benefits from it, and who should pay for it.

All in all an excellent day. I hadn't been to ExCel before - it's huge!  And the show managed to pack a lot of high quality speakers into one day. 




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