Details of our activities

Goal 1. Strong foundations in Early Years

As a University, our most recent Ofsted inspections have rated our Early Years –Primary Education provision as outstanding. We have also revalidated Early and Middle Years programmes for those wanting to work alongside the school sector. Through this provision we work to equip the teachers of the future with all that they need to effect positive change.

Goal 2. Successful school years

Our Outreach Team is dedicated to working closely with a wide range of schools, schoolchildren, their teachers and career advisors, with a view to broadening aspirations and enhancing awareness of the benefits of higher education.

In 2021/22 the Team attended 247 events in schools and colleges, delivered 60 online sessions and hosted 28 campus visits, working with schools and colleges across the North West, North Wales, Shropshire, Staffordshire and the West Midlands.

In July 2022, we welcomed almost 100 Year 12 students to Chester for a 4-day ‘Taste of University’ residential event, so they could experience what student life is like at the University of Chester via subject taster sessions and sports and social activities. Crucially, priority was given to students from identified underrepresented backgrounds.

Particularly focusing on demographics and geographical areas that are underrepresented in higher education currently, our Pathfinder project targets key areas and delivers sustained outreach relevant to schoolchildren’s current phase of education. This offer is designed to stimulate social mobility by making the link between aspiration and attainment. The Higher Education Access Tracker (HEAT) is then used to record activities and measure our effectiveness in encouraging young people to progress into higher education.

Engaging our students in this work, our ‘Students in Schools’ scheme arranges volunteering opportunities in local primary and secondary schools across Cheshire and the Wirral, with our students providing one-to-one mentoring, classroom support and paired reading groups.

Goal 3. Positive destinations post 16+

Following on from our work towards Goal 2, our Outreach Team has worked with national mentoring charity, Brightside, to deliver the ‘Get Connected’ mentoring project, which supported new students from Widening Participation backgrounds with their transition to university. We were proud to receive second place for this activity in the What Uni Student Choice Awards!

Our expert Centre for Foundation Studies supports those who need a bit extra help as they enter higher education, offering a variety of Foundation Year routes. Other support to make higher education possible for more people includes Foundation Year Bursaries, Care Experienced Bursaries and a Carer Support Package. We also offer tailored support for estranged and care experienced students, including accommodation support, a dedicated link member of staff, and access to a peer group.

Supporting social mobility into higher education is essential, but ‘traditional’ degrees are not the only option. Our apprenticeship offer includes policing, social work, nursing and engineering, and we work closely with employers to ensure that participants gain the practical, industry-specific skills, knowledge and experience they need to reach their chosen career. The opportunity for flexible study is incredibly valuable in support of widening participation.

These, and the other activities we undertake to diversify our student population, are so important: in 2022 almost half of those who graduated with us came to us from underrepresented backgrounds.

Goal 4. Right advice and experiences

In addition to the wide range of volunteering opportunities available to students and staff, and our core careers service, we offer a range of specialised support tailored more specifically to social mobility.

Inspiring Futures is our exclusive programme of additional careers related activities and support, available to current undergraduates from underrepresented groups. The programme encourages students to access opportunities via Industry Insights, Workplace Experiences, LinkedIn Learning, and additional funding via our Futures Employability Fund, Santander Network Fund and the ASPIRE Fund.

Further advice is provided via our new Graduate Peer Mentoring scheme, which engages experienced graduates to share their skills and knowledge with students and recent graduates as they transition from university into a career, while gaining beneficial experience for themselves.

We love to celebrate students who go the extra mile to access the support on offer and make it work for them. The Chester Difference Award recognises students who take part in activities that enhance their employability and career development, and is designed to help them reflect on their career plans, develop and articulate key employability skills, understand the recruitment process, build social capital and cultivate their networks.

Goal 5. Open recruitment

As detailed in the Case Study section, we’ve worked hard on this one. We’ve developed an anonymous recruitment process for students applying for a workplace experience with an employer. The data included in the case study highlights some really great outcomes from this work. We also collaborate with a graduate recruitment agency specialising in social mobility, targeting students from underrepresented backgrounds with suitable job vacancies, and work with local, national and international employers who are actively promoting opportunities for individuals from underrepresented groups. This includes activities relating to application support, increasing opportunity awareness and mentoring opportunities.

Giving students experience of the recruitment process from a different angle, our ‘Students as Recruiters’ scheme trains and supports students to play a key role in the recruitment process of student-facing staff applying to join the University.

Goal 6. Fair career progression

In terms of supporting the career progression of our staff, we have well-established informal and formal mentoring schemes in place, and Leadership Academy workshops are available to all staff who currently manage people or aspire to a management position. We actively encourage the development of women leaders via Advance HE’s Aurora scheme, a leadership programme tailored to women working in our sector.

Available to both our staff and the wider public, our Work-Based and Integrative Studies (WBIS) framework enables working professionals to tailor their study and research activities to their chosen career. WBIS offers flexible study at Level 4 and above, takes into account prior learning, and recognises experiential learning undertaken in the workplace.

Goal 7. Widening access to savings & credit and Financial Inclusion

We want our students to get the best start in achieving their career and personal aspirations, and to make higher education possible for more people. Part of that means targeted financial assistance and advice, including debt counselling. In addition to longstanding non-repayable hardship funds, more recently we have put in place a substantial cost-of-living crisis package of support for students, which has included subsidised food and free period products.

Beyond our students, we also work within our local communities to champion financial inclusion: staff board membership of the West Cheshire Poverty Truth Commission has led to some meaningful work, including engaging individuals with lived experience of poverty as Community Inspirers to co-create supportive solutions. This work has also included co-production of a new ‘Food for All’ strategy, focused on tackling food poverty locally.

Goal 8. Good health and wellbeing

We are committed to promoting a culture where wellbeing issues can be discussed and supported openly, and recognise the importance of both physical and mental wellbeing. As a result, we have signed up to the University Mental Health Charter, and encourage staff and student leaders to undertake Mental Health First Aid Training. We are working with other universities to develop a ‘Recovery Friendly University’ pledge, and provide Recovery Ally training for staff and students to support individuals in recovery from addictions.

Our offer to students includes a 24/7 Student Assistance Programme and online self-help sessions (support for, e.g., sleep, social anxiety and unhelpful thinking), which evolve in response to student feedback. We champion peer support groups, including a Male Mental Health Group and a Student Parent Support Network, and develop tailored sessions for our growing community of international students, aimed at helping them to feel more ‘at home’ in Chester. For our staff, we offer a confidential telephone counselling service and discounted gym membership, and our well-established Nursing provision, and new Chester Medical School, are dedicated to developing well-rounded healthcare professionals.

Working beyond our immediate University community, our Volunteering Team link students with more than 100 local charities, many of which focus on support for vulnerable members of our community. We have excellent links with the Armed Forces community, and have undertaken an evaluation of the Armed Forces Covenant Trust’s Tackling Serious Stress Programme, and provide expertise to a number of local and national safeguarding charities in support of older people in our community. At our University Centre Birkenhead, we have piloted an innovative Creative Health offer, where nursing students work alongside artists to understand the benefits of artbased activities for wellbeing, including our students organising a café for members of the public to drop-in and take part. The success of this work has resulted in it being extended to our University Centre Warrington.

Goal 9. Extending enterprise

Our Venture programme supports 1,000+ students and graduates to explore business ideas and engage in enterprise activity, developing the skills, confidence and connections they need to work for themselves. As part of the programme, Santander Universities provides up to £5,000 to support UK students’ or graduates’ new businesses or freelancing ideas, and in 2021/22 this led to 21 new student-led businesses. In March 2020 Venture was showcased nationally as best practice in entrepreneurial support.

Other routes by which students gain enterprise skills and experience include our 5-week workbased learning placements for second-year students (in 2021/22, 307 organisations across 68 industries and sectors hosted 514 students), and student-led volunteering projects, where students receive training to support them project manage activities and groups of volunteers.

Our support and expertise extend to the existing business community also, via our range of business support activities, which have worked with more than 1,800 businesses to date. Our work includes support for potential entrepreneurs and small businesses via bootcamps, 1:1 support and workshops. We are particularly proud of the women-led small businesses that we have helped to nurture through this activity, and the part-funded training we delivered to 1,393 employed people in Cheshire and Warrington during the Covid-19 pandemic, which supported 319 employer organisations.

Goal 10. Closing the digital divide

As for so many organisations, the Covid-19 pandemic catalysed a transformation in the way we use digital tools, and we are involved in supporting this transition within our communities, also. Our Digital on Tour van, which is equipped with drones, LiDAR scanners and AR/VR headsets to engage in digital skills outreach activity with local communities, schools, businesses and our own students, has to date worked with more than

2,500 individuals (of all ages) and more than 70 businesses located with Cheshire and Warrington.

Addressing the needs of our students, our Digital Inclusion Fund is designed to support those who are struggling to access the internet, have no regular access to a laptop or computer, or need software or materials in order to complete their course. Our Digital Skills Weeks offer events and activities designed to build students’ digital skills and awareness, and we have introduced PlayLabs for teaching staff to explore how they can better use digital resources to support their students.

Goal 11. Infrastructure for Opportunity

Connecting people and places to opportunity is at the core of our institutional mission. Since 2021 we’ve invested more than £6.5m moving our University Centre Warrington into the town centre (from our existing site outside town), helping to break down barriers (both perceived and actual) to accessing higher education. The focus of the new Centre is skills provision that will enable local people (of any age) to gain employment, or progress in the workplace, building on our work to date in Warrington, where consistently 50%+ of our learners are the first generation in their family to pursue higher education, and 70%+ live locally. The move has created new facilities to better serve the needs of the town, including a digital learning centre and collaborative spaces for use by both businesses and local communities, alongside our students.

More broadly, we work closely with our students and staff, and local place makers, to increase accessibility to our Centres. Our Transport Steering Group reviews travel and transport data to define key developments, and is informed by our ‘Let’s Talk Transport’ group, which facilitates discussions around the barriers to sustainable and active travel and looks for potential solutions. The University is represented on a local Travel Demand Group, which aims to exercise influence over transport policy developments in support of increased access to jobs, healthcare and education.

Goal 12. Building homes and sustainable communities

As an ‘anchor’ institution that brings students of all ages into our local areas, we recognise our significant place-making responsibilities here, and the need to partner with other key organisations and communities. In addition to our formal partnership agreements with local authorities, we work with a number of local organisations, including police community support officers, to improve public safety, and were awarded £550,000 by the Police and Crime Commissioner for Cheshire as part of the Safer Streets funding. This funding was used to implement additional CCTV and lighting, a safer taxi scheme, the pilot of a safety app and training for 13 local businesses to become safe spaces, among other work. This added value to our existing student-focused campaigns relating to issues such as personal safety, drug use and river safety.

We are a part of the local communities where our University Centres are based, and seek to improve the spaces we all share. Our Chester city centre gallery space – designed to actively engage with our local community – attracted more than 5,000 visitors in 2021/22, and staff and students regularly co-host events at leading cultural centre, Storyhouse, in Chester. We have a longstanding relationship with the Warrington Wolves Foundation (the charitable arm of the professional rugby league club), and have worked with them to deliver and measure positive impacts in their communities.

Goal 13. Harness the energy transition & Net Zero

We are involved in a number of strategic initiatives dedicated to this priority, in line with our commitment to supporting sustainable and inclusive growth in our local areas. Our VC sits on the Board of the Environmental Association of Universities and Colleges (EAUC), which seeks to drive sustainability to the heart of further and higher education. Working with more than 220 colleges and universities from across the UK, the EAUC is now the recognised hub of sustainability best practice in our sector. We are also academic lead for the HyNet North West industrial decarbonisation cluster, which aims to reduce annual CO2 emissions by 10 million tonnes by 2030 – the equivalent of taking four million cars off the road. In January 2022 we established the HyNet Skills, Learning and Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Subcommittee, focused on ensuring that the industrial decarbonisation agenda delivers inclusive skills and employment opportunities. The Subcommittee brings together industry leaders from across the North West and North Wales to support economic growth and enhanced social value through up- and re-skilling the current and future workforce.

As a large organisation, we have our own commitments to this agenda and a responsibility to lead the way. In addition to embedding sustainability practices as part of our institutional culture, in April 2017 we joined 48 other UK universities in pledging not to invest in fossil fuel industries. We aim to achieve Net Zero for Scope 1 and 2 emissions across all activities and operations by 2030, and to date we have reduced our carbon footprint by 49.5% (compared to the 2014/15 baseline). Our Roadmap to Net Zero is taking a whole-institution approach, focusing on changes to our estate and our activities. Further, none of our waste is sent to landfill, and we have opened a ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle’ shop, enabling students, staff and local community members to bring their own containers to purchase dry goods and milk, plus make use of a clothing ‘Swap and Drop’ facility.

We work hard to co-create opportunities for our students to make a difference, too. Our annual ‘Go Green Festival’ includes two weeks of workshops and activities that aim to inspire action on climate change, both at the personal level and via influencing change in our wider community. We also encourage staff and students to undertake Carbon Literacy Training, which is delivered over six hours of online or inperson webinars and cultivates an understanding of the science behind climate change, the concept of social justice, and provides practical knowledge about how to reduce carbon footprints. Carbon literate citizens are then given the opportunity to become trainers themselves.

Goal 14. Achieve equality through diversity and inclusion

In relation to our commitment to increasing the diversity of our student population, our Access and Participation Plan sets ambitious targets in support of the increased recruitment, retention and academic outcomes of care leavers, white working-class males, disabled students, and Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic males from lower participation neighbourhoods, among others. We support our students via a series of networks, including those focused on Student Parents and Menopause, and peer support groups for CareExperienced students, Estranged students and Carers. Following funding from the Office for Students, we have developed an online Autism Toolkit in collaboration with the West Cheshire Autism Hub, which details support for students and information for parents.

Our staff and student Race Equality Challenge Group, led by the VC, promotes positive change in relation to race, equality and diversity, and identifies practical and tangible changes that can be implemented to make a real difference to how all members of the University feel about and respond to race equality. Since January 2021 we have employed Student Race Advocates to actively support and promote the needs of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic students. These efforts are supported by our Respect campaign, which promotes respect, addresses unacceptable behaviours and endorses equality, diversity and inclusion.

With staff we have established a number of supportive networks and groups, aimed at opening up discussions relating to disabled staff, LGBT+ staff and cultural heritage. Our annual, free Diversity Festival is open to staff, students and the wider public and has attracted many high-profile speakers since it began in 2006, celebrating all aspects of equality, diversity and inclusion. In 2023 the theme was ‘Action for Change’, highlighting the actions (however big or small) we can all take to make meaningful changes to inclusion and belonging.

Our commitment to equality and inclusion extends beyond our immediate University community.

We have provided expertise and leadership to the Cheshire and Warrington Sustainable and Inclusive Growth Commission, which was established to realise local ambitions of becoming the most sustainable and inclusive subregion in the UK.