Driving social mobility

Higher education transforms lives. At Northumbria University, research-enriched taught programmes, all of which will have experiential learning embedded in them by 2025, help students from all backgrounds to achieve their ultimate ambitions. But fewer students from low participation backgrounds find their way into highly skilled jobs or further study that can open up new opportunities and transform their lives. Our aim is to eliminate that difference, so that all of our students have the same likelihood of success after completing their studies. Experiential learning will be especially advantageous for these students, many of whom are first in family to go to university. It will help those who currently lack the social capital or networks to access employment opportunities. But it will not be enough on its own. We will further tailor our education offer so that how and when we teach better meets the needs of students. We will enhance onboarding and enable better access to student services and support with cost of living and mental health. Support will better meet the needs of different groups of students and educational analytics will enable us to direct it to those most in need. These changes will provide equitable help for students to stay at Northumbria, complete their degree and succeed in their post-study ambitions.

We will also make sure that we maintain the same proportion of undergraduate students recruited from low participation backgrounds. Our ambition is to ignite aspiration, remove barriers for the communities that we serve and offer routes for students from all backgrounds to access and succeed in higher education. Maintaining our access performance will be a challenge, not least because of cost of living pressures for students and limited prospects of fundamental reforms to student maintenance funding. We are committed to meeting these challenges. We will specifically evolve our own education offer to respond to demand from groups to study in different ways, for example by growing degree apprenticeships where possible. In recognising our civic responsibility and the lower participation rate in the North East, we will support prospective students to consider higher education wherever they choose to study.

We will explicitly embed our ambitions for access and success in our student recruitment, education and research, while maintaining the academic excellence that we have fostered over the last decade. These ambitions will apply wherever we operate. In London we will recruit and support more students from the local community near our campus and, overseas, our TNE activity will support access to UK higher education for those unable to travel to the UK.