Our senior staff share their insight into how the University serves the local community

SERVING OUR LOCAL COMMUNITY

BEING A CIVIC UNIVERSITY

The Covid-19 crisis put a spotlight on universities’ roles in their communities like never before. Here Charlotte Morris, Corporate and Regional Aff airs Manager, talks about how the Greater Manchester-wide civic university agreement can help our city region build back better.

We’re very proud of our historic roots in the city of Salford and our regional role in Greater Manchester. Originally founded as the Royal Technical Institute of

Charlotte Morris, Salford in 1896, we’ve

Regional Aff airs Manager been a civic-minded university, embedded in the very fabric of our community and the wider region, throughout our 125 history. We have always and will always work with partners to drive positive social and economic change in our city and our city region, whether training the workforce of the future or working with industry to tackle real world social and economic challenges. Post-Covid, these partnerships will be crucial to driving our economic recovery from the pandemic. That is why we are proud to have recently signed a joint civic university agreement with the other higher education institutions of Greater Manchester. This ground-breaking deal is the biggest and most ambitious civic university agreement in the country. Covering a population of 2.8 million people across the two cities and eight distinct boroughs of Greater Manchester, it commits the University of Salford to collective action with the other universities of our city region on a range of priority issues, from reducing inequalities to reaching net zero carbon emissions. Civic university agreements should respond to local need and so, as part of our work to develop the Greater Manchester deal, we carried out a poll of 1,000 people living across the city region to understand what they want from their universities. The results of this survey show that our universities are seen as central to the future success and prosperity of our city region. Specifi cally, 73% of respondents stated that universities are important to the local economy, and 79% think we are important to making our region a better place to live. Our polling also found that people living in Greater Manchester most value our role in training future professionals to work locally, creating jobs for local residents and providing opportunities for local people to study, as well as attracting international students to Greater Manchester. And when asked about the long term economic and social priorities for the city region people told us it was economic recovery from Covid, reducing inequality, creating jobs and improving the quality of jobs for local people, and improving health and wellbeing. So, our Greater Manchester civic university agreement seeks to respond to this feedback by setting out a number of shared priorities that will help drive improvements in education and skills, tackle inequalities, create jobs and growth, support the digital economy, help Greater Manchester reach net zero by 2038 and drive our creative and cultural economy.

Each of these priorities are crucial to ensuring Greater Manchester is one of the best places to grow up, get on and grow old and we’re really proud as a university to be playing our part in helping our city region to meet this ambition.

A NEW APPROACH TO SKILLS DELIVERY

New approaches to education and training are needed to meet the skills needs of industry. Jo Purves, Pro Vice Chancellor for Academic Development, talks here about how the University of Salford is responding to this challenge.

High skilled jobs are vital to a region’s economic security, sense of identity and quality of life. Unfortunately, the UK, and the North in particular, is facing a skills shortage in the industries of today and of the future. It is clear that the UK and Greater Manchester need to rethink how higher-level technical skills are delivered.

Here in Greater Manchester, the Local Industrial Strategy recognised that a defi cit in certain types of skills is restricting economic growth. These skills are needed to respond to the key challenges of the day, such as an ageing society, the transition to clean growth, raising productivity and raising living standards. To support the residents of Greater Manchester to fl ourish in the economy of tomorrow, innovative new approaches to skills delivery are needed. One of the successes of education policy over the past decade has been the ongoing expansion of the higher education sector. However, while more people – and crucially more people from disadvantaged backgrounds – entering university has been hugely positive for our economy and our society, there has been insuffi cient focus on the opportunities for those who want to continue with education after school or college, but who don’t want to study for a full bachelor’s degree. This has left us with too few people trained to ‘sub-degree’ level, which is known as level four and fi ve, and created a ‘missing middle’ skills gap that industry is crying out to be fi lled. This problem is worsened by the artifi cial wall that has often been erected between further and higher education. A skills system that closes our skills gap must recognise the crossover between higher and further education, embrace it, and break down those barriers. On top of this, the traditional university route has also become more diffi cult for mature students, or part time students – both of which have seen a sharp decline in recent years – which means that we do not have a true lifelong education system in England. At the University of Salford, we want to tackle these challenges head on. We have partnered with further education colleges and industry partners from right across Greater Jo Purves, Manchester and in Pro Vice Chancellor a range of sectors to bid for an Institute of Technology. This institute would off er a range of technically-focussed programmes across engineering, construction, digital technology and media at level four and fi ve to provide people with the skills they need to succeed in the modern economy. It will also be structured to allow students to learn in their own local area, through partners such as Bury College, Wigan and Leigh College, Tameside College and ADA National College for Digital Skills. We think this will be critical in helping us to get to those harder to reach groups and older learners who might not naturally think going to university is for them. Our history, of delivering skills to industry for over 100 years, makes us ideally suited to help reduce the skills gap in our region. We have long worked with industry to ensure that our curriculum delivers real world skills, and our students graduate confi dent that they can thrive and become leaders in industry. We are really excited about the potential of the Greater Manchester Institute of Technology, but even if we’re unsuccessful in this bid, we remain committed to developing and delivering these new programmes. Throughout our 125 year history as an institution, we’ve constantly innovated what we do; and we don’t intend to stop now.