SDG 4 - Quality Education

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SDG 4 - Quality Education - Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.

Bucks New University has a proud history of offering employment-focused and skills-based learning and removing barriers to participation in higher education.

We are committed to ensuring that our graduates are well-prepared and confident in rising to the challenges of the highly competitive employment market. Boosting future employability is a key focus for Bucks students’ from their very first days with us.

Our Impact 2022 strategy builds on our historic mission to transform lives through inspiring, employment- and profession-focused education, enabling people positively to impact society and their future. It calls for us to assess the value of our work through the University’s impact on students, staff, stakeholders, communities and strategic partners.

Our vision is for Buckinghamshire New University to become a University that is highly connected, permeable, student- and customer-focused, business-oriented, strategically aligned, impactful and aligned to strategic partners. We will provide an education that works for all regardless of background or circumstance; provides students with skills for life, able to meet the global challenges of the 21st Century; and is ethical and sustainable, from a University that always meets its social responsibilities, to students, to staff, and to society.

We will develop our position as an innovative, teaching-oriented University, delivering sectorleading and life-changing educational and employment outcomes for our students.

Our education will be flexible, inclusive, enquirybased and employer-informed, and designed around the needs of our students. We will deliver research and innovation that impacts and enhances lives and society and underpins our educational offer. We will be an outwardly-focused institution, entrepreneurial in spirit, meeting our ethical and social responsibilities, expanding our reach through. Our commitment to widening participation in higher education We are proud to attract a highly diverse student intake and are significantly above the sector average in our numbers of mature and Black (23.3%), Asian (17.8%) and mixed ethnicity (4.1%) students. The diversity in our student body reflects our longstanding and highly successful work to reach out to underrepresented groups in higher education; to provide an environment and form of education that meets their needs; and to support them into high levels of graduate employment. Compared to the UK higher education sector, Bucks has non-significant attainment gaps between different ethnic groups; there are no gaps for those with a declared disability; and no significant gap for those students from the most deprived quintiles. While in 2018-19, the sector attainment gap between white and black students was 22pp, at Bucks it was 8pp and reducing significantly year on year. When it comes to graduate employment rates, no significant gaps are seen between different ethnic groups, for those with disabilities, or for students from different deprivation quintiles.

Building on our success, and consistent with our mission, we are developing our widening participation work still further in order to pioneer routes into higher education for the hardest-toreach communities.

Buckinghamshire New University’s 2020-24 Access and Participation Plan was approved by the UK Government’s Director for Fair Access and Participation (Office for Students) in November 2019. It includes our ambitions to improve equality of opportunity for all students to access, succeed in and progress from higher education, what we plan to do to achieve that ambition, the targets we have set, and the investment we will make to deliver the plan.

In our plan we have set the following objectives to:

Accessing higher education

Maintain high levels of equality in relation to access for all groups and increase the rates of access for students from the areas of lowest higher education participation; those declaring a disability; and those declaring care-leaver status.

Adopt a new and ambitious focus on groups where equality may be harder to achieve (with a focus on young carers, children from military families, and students identifying as being from Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities).

Succeeding in higher education

Close the small attainment gaps between BAME and White students; between students from the most deprived and least deprived areas; and between male and female students.

Nurture an academic community to which students feel they belong to ensure strong retention for all learners.

Successful employment after graduation-

Improve the rates of highly skilled employment for students from the areas of lowest participation; young students; and for BAME students.

Increase the opportunities for all students to enter highly skilled employment or further study.

Schools outreach programme The University has developed an extremely successful outreach programme which continues to grow. Futures Days involve inviting Year 9 students from disadvantaged backgrounds on to campus for a day to learn about the benefits of university through engaging activities and games. Feedback is impressive and demonstrates an 80% increase in students who agree or strongly agree that they would like to go to university following the event. The team also provides activities for a range of school year groups and both Study Higher and Widening Participation have seen 426 students over 60 contact hours in the last year.

These teams also carry out school visits, participate and host careers fairs and have offered mentoring for groups of students. The demographics of participants demonstrate the reach of our programme: 60% are female; just under half would be the first in their family to attend university; 7% are care leavers or in care; one in four students said they had a disability; 42% were black or minority ethnic; and 30% came from the lowest participation areas for higher education.

As part of a wider LEP-funded capital project at Aylesbury, we created a mobile outreach facility, which is touring the area’s schools, colleges and exhibitions to provide an immersive simulation experience to give younger people and careerchangers a glimpse of careers and training available. This project is also funded through the Office for Students’ Uni-Connect scheme, locally known as Study Higher. The team has already worked with 2969 students from 27 schools and supported family and youth-oriented events in the community.

Inclusive curriculum Our data indicate that gaps, in terms of successful outcomes, are experienced by BAME males and those learners from the most deprived quintile. It is our intention to reduce these gaps, focusing especially on attainment and progression rates. Internal annual monitoring suggests some specific subject areas which demonstrate the most significant, and consistent attainment gaps. We have developed a new Student Achievement & Success unit to provide learner-facing support to consolidate and enhance academic and knowledge skills - recognising the breadth of learner attributes who engage with our programmes. However, we also recognise that our targets provide a challenge which requires us to fully embed a cross university strategy on raising attainment. As part of our Curriculum Renaissance strategic transformation project, we have embedded inclusive attainment raising initiatives recognised as sector best practice. As all learners have individual needs, we recognise that engagement enhancement activities with both staff and students will be an important driver of change and support our ambitious targets. The importance of the cultural change required across all student engagement points is highlighted as central to enabling the impact on learner attainment and thus we will continue to implement this, with milestones that are more ambitious and evaluation to ensure momentum of change continues.

Placement Plus From September 2019, Bucks New University became a “Placement Plus” institution. Placement Plus places a distinct emphasis on aspects of the student experience that will enhance students’ transition into highly skilled graduate level employment, particularly through engagement with employers. Placement Plus is aligned to the institutional objective of improving educational excellence and student outcomes and ensuring that 75% of Bucks graduates enter highly-skilled employment or further study.

The Bucks Graduate attributes are enshrined in the university’s corporate strategy. They focus on the development of innovative leaders, in professional and creative capacities, who are equipped to operate in the 21st Century employment market, and make a positive impact as global citizens. One of these four attributes is “Social and ethical awareness and responsibility” and focuses on Sustainability (environmental, economic and personal) Cultural awareness Global citizenship Empathy Rights and justice Integrity. All of our programmes learning outcomes are now linked to these graduate outcomes.

The Placement Plus framework supports students’ attainment of the Bucks Graduate Attributes. The initiative involves the embedding of work-related and work-based activity at all levels of all undergraduate programmes at Bucks, increasing the opportunities for students to engage with employers in authentic ‘real world’ settings to boost their employability following graduation.

Activity is diverse and covers the full spectrum of work-based activities, from ‘live briefs’ set by employers and employer-run competitions, through to full placement opportunities, while activity scales with the level of study. At Level 4, students primarily participate via Placement Plus Sprint Activities as part of a fifteen-week programme which runs alongside their course programme. Level 5 activity (where placements are not provided) is integrated in specific branded modules and focuses on the application of subject principles in an employment context. Level 6 activity provides students with the opportunity to work directly with employers as an alternative to the traditional project or dissertation.

A Career Confidence Survey to determine the level to which Placement Plus has impacted on the students’ career confidence was undertaken in October 2019. The intention is for it to be completed at the start of level 4 and then repeated at the beginning of each year. A total of 85 students responded during the first pilot and 60% of our students perceived themselves to be at the start of their career journey, followed by career developers and then career changers. Students suggest that in overall terms they feel more confident in attributes relating to leadership and selfdevelopment, and social and ethical awareness and responsibility, and less confident in attributes relating to creativity and knowledge and its application.

Engagement with the Placement Plus Sprint has been outstanding. We have seen a 300%+ increase in activities undertaken on the careers platform in October 2019 compared with October 2018.

Building on the service’s ‘Career Start’ approach, we will work across support and academic teams to develop a more consistent approach to welcoming back level 5 and 6 students and engaging them in career planning. We will explore in more detail the aspirations of BAME students, and examine the extent to which students are career-orientated or opportunistic. We will design and implement programmes to help students develop their sense of career orientation, and enhance their understanding of how they can be more successful in their career and job decision-making.

Bucks has a long-track record in securing Erasmus+ funding to develop European educational programmes. We have also had successful nominations to the Association of Commonwealth Universities Global Grants for the last three years.

Degree apprenticeships The University has grown its higher and degree level apprenticeship numbers significantly in the last year, to 530, with hundreds more due to start in the coming months. All of our apprentices are in fulltime, permanent positions and span a variety of age groups. Many work in the public sector, contributing to healthcare and we are working towards the start of a new Policing apprenticeship programme which will see hundreds of new police officers trained through two routes; one apprenticeship and one for degree-holders. Our apprenticeship programmes develop skills to a point where career progression is attained, leading to increased pay and employability.