LIVER POOL JOH N MOOR ES UN IVERSITY
SPOTLIGHT ON MARK POWER AND LIVERPOOL JOHN MOORES UNIVERSITY
FROM
ART ACADEMIA TO
Mark Power is the Academic Registrar and Chief Operating Officer of Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU). We speak to him about his career journey from an artist into academia and how LJMU is creating opportunities across the Irish Sea and levelling up Northern Ireland as a result.
Q A
// Can you tell me about the work you’ve been doing in Northern Ireland and the ‘opportunity bridge’ you have created?
// Our links with Northern Ireland go back many
years and we’ve built a reputation on actually having a presence there, going over and talking to schools and colleges. Our great ambassadors for the University are those Northern Irish students who have travelled over to Liverpool, studied with us and in a number of cases have returned to Northern Ireland and built successful careers. We have a relatively small team of people who are dedicated to ensuring that we offer support, guidance and advice both to teachers and college lecturers but also running events to
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support parents and carers of applicants. That builds a sense of confidence that the institution recognises that the Northern Irish population is particularly important to us and we recognise the challenge that Northern Ireland has as part of the UK. This plays very much into the University’s ethos around widening participation and providing opportunities to students from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. Our Northern Irish students represent just over 10 per cent of our population. We have a student population of 20,000 undergraduates, so it’s a large number. We recognise that many of those students are from severely disadvantaged backgrounds and we do a considerable amount of work to raise their aspirations to come to University and once they are here to ensure they get the best possible experience they can. We support them in any way we can to achieve their potential.
Q//
How do you support Northern Irish students once they are at LJMU?
A//
It’s recognising that some of the best mentors for students are fellow students and working with them to almost provide a
