BREAKING THE MOULD

SPOTLIGHT ON NICK PETFORD AND UNIVERSITY OF NORTHAMPTON

in higher education

DESPITE HAVING NO INTENTION TO STUDY FOR A DEGREE AS A YOUNG MAN, NICK PETFORD IS NOW VICE CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTHAMPTON. AS HE TELLS FIT FOR PURPOSE, HIS OWN JOURNEY IS HELPING TO INFORM HOW THE INSTITUTION SUPPORTS THE LEVELLING UP AGENDA AND DRIVES CHANGE IN THE COMMUNITIES IT SERVES.

Q// Your university is doing a lot of work to support levelling up - and you’re taking quite a different approach to other institutions aren’t you?

A// The whole levelling up agenda is something which speaks volumes to us as a university. We only became a university in 2005, so we didn’t have to follow the more traditional route that many older universities have adopted as part of the history. We had a chance to do something a bit different. We aligned ourselves with the idea of social enterprise and social innovation. The mission since we started is transforming lives and inspiring change. It speaks to how we take students from all backgrounds and all ages, and really instil in them this notion of purpose. Why do a degree in any in any shape or form unless you can actually add social value back into society once you finish once you’ve graduated? That’s the student base, but also how can we as a university - as a key central part of our local community, business community, the third sector and health sector – work with those partners to add social value to maximise impact in the community in which the university is embedded. A key differentiator between us and other universities is that we didn’t rush it out and set up a research centre to write papers on all of this, as important as that is. We just dived in and did things on the street. We went out there and started working with a local community on activity based projects.

Q// Tell us more about how you did that.

A// One example is that we work very closely with the logistics industry. So how do you get social mobility through a supply chain? We struck up a partnership with a local company called Goodwill Solutions and their social mission is to employ only ex-offenders, or ex-military who have had potentially significant mental health issues. We invested in it as a university and we run a training centre now through Goodwill Solutions. It’s won the Queen’s Award for Enterprise last year, and other awards, because it’s seen as a model for generating social impact, doing social good, using business models. It really allows you to put social good and business on the same spot on the diagram. I think post-COVID, that idea of businesses working much more closely with their communities and adding real value to communities is going to be an important point of the recovery, post COVID, and it’s an important part of the levelling up agenda as well.

Q// And when you developed your Waterside Campus, even the act of getting it built and procured was an opportunity to also add wider social impact.

A// Yes, which leads us to the idea of social procurement. This is using the buying power of something like a university - and if you look at the turnover of universities across the UK, it’s in the billions. We’re always buying things, but how do we target that spend to allow job creation, better prospects for people who are perhaps unemployed? How do you get more people into training? How do you leverage the Apprenticeship Levy using your procurement power? As a superpower, how can we drive that into the local community? An example would be buying food. Universities spend a lot of money on food on catering, let’s buy local, let’s create local jobs and keep the pound local. Let’s get the social value in the pound, keep it in the locality and drive up growth, wages and jobs. All of that, ultimately, can involve procurement in a social way. It doesn’t mean always going for the lowest price when you’re buying a good or service. It means looking at price, yes, but also looking at the social value, the social good that your pound will do when you buy something outside the university.

Q// Do you get a sense that there is real appetite in the higher and further education sectors to start investigating these kinds of changes a bit more? A// Definitely. I think the scope for partnerships in this model is intense. Universities have done a brilliant job in the whole social procurement side anyway, through the local regional collaborations and partnerships that they have. But I think there’s just more that could be done. We should be working much more closely, perhaps in terms of joint procurement, with the big employers in towns. I’m looking at Northampton General Hospital right now, But there’s a cricket club, a football club, a rugby club. The next step in this journey is to make sure that where possible, we do our purchasing in a socially valuable way.

Q// What was your journey into a higher education sector? Was this a route you always wanted to go down - or are you one of those VCs that’s had a very different career path before ending up running a university?

A// I did have a different trajectory into university than many people. I left school in 1977 at 16. I didn’t go on to do A levels, I went to a technical college to do a refrigeration engineering course. I think only five or six per cent of students actually went on to do university degrees back then. Now it’s closer to 50 per cent. I had no ambition to go to university. My parents hadn’t gone and nobody in my family went to university. It was something which the group I was with, didn’t even discuss.

Q// And so you chose that course because it led to a job locally?

A// Yes. I applied for apprenticeships. I wanted to get into the heating and ventilating trade. Don’t ask me why, I just thought that was a good place to try and get a job. There was nothing around actually and there was a quite a strong recession in the mid to late 70s. I ended up going with my second best option, I didn’t want to go back into education really. I went to a technical college and did a City and Guilds, but even then, it was quite hard to get into full time work in that business. I ended up doing a whole raft of different sorts of jobs working in retail, I was a van driver for a couple of years for a department store. I was made redundant several times and when I was actually signing on, in the dole centre, and I saw a sign saying ‘do an access course at a university’. I did that and I was lucky enough to get a place at Goldsmith’s, reading geology. I did geology because I wanted to get to stay in a vocational area – I wanted to work on an oil rig, basically because there was good money in that. And so that that’s how I got into higher education. But as I experienced university, I realised there’s much, much more to it than just learning things. I really liked the environment, the whole aspect of university life and what it was about, and in particular, I got very involved and interested in research in my undergraduate times. So that led me to do a PhD. Then I got some research fellowships, and then from that I got into the whole academic side of university life and never looked back. Q// If you look back, what would you say was the biggest challenge you had to overcome? Can you pinpoint times when you really had to dig deep?

A// At Northampton, it was when we were we decided to build the new campus. That was a big step for the whole university, for the university community and for the town as well, and actually the county of Northamptonshire. It was a big project and the stars were aligned. The coalition government was introducing new local enterprise partnerships and Northampton town centre was designated as an enterprise zone and so that freed up a lot of planning constraints, in an area of focus for redevelopment. Some of the issues that we had to deal with around the whole planning consent, wading through just the bureaucracy to build a university was extraordinary. I think at one stage, we were dealing with about 37 different partners, involving everyone from utilities companies through to highways, through to all the different planning authorities, and the Environment Agency, all the rest of it, and it became almost overwhelming. There were points in time where the whole project just could have come crashing down. But we dug our heels in times of stress because we had faith in the project. And I think that’s the key thing, if you really do believe in something, and want it to happen and want it to succeed, and if you follow that passion and follow that compass, it allows you to achieve amazing things.

Q// If you were giving advice to your younger self, what would you say?

A// I think if you can just stop and ask yourself three things. Firstly where do you come from as an individual? What’s your background? What’s your personal history? What’s your value set? Then ask yourself who are you? What do you believe in? And finally, what are the things that you stand for? What are you going to go to the wall for? I couldn’t have answered those questions. Back then I had a vague sense of some of them. I certainly knew where I came from, but I wasn’t really quite sure what I stood for. Now, I think I’m much more resilient in terms of being able to answer those questions. I think as a university we can answer them as well. I think if you can’t answer those questions, you’re going to be slightly adrift, as an individual or as an organisation.