Our mission & vision
Our strategic vision builds on our historic mission, to provide education within a vibrant, inclusive community that inspires learning, develops potential, and widens participation in order ambitiously to transform lives. Our current University strategy, Impact 2022, has galvanised an expansion of work in the University’s core endeavours – Education and Research & Knowledge Exchange – supported by cross-cutting work to develop social responsibility and reputation, customer service, the One University, and commercial activities, all underpinned by strategies for our key resources – people, financial, estates and digital. We aimed for our students and staff to love being at the University, proud of an organisation that helps them to grow, to develop and to make a real difference. We developed our behavioural values - DRIVE (overleaf ). We aimed to deliver by 2022 our vision to be a University with sector-leading impact, renowned for an education that is flexible, built around the needs of its students, and vocationally-based, ensuring their career success. Above all, aimed to become a University that is financially strong, built on growth in student numbers, with an excellent reputation for student experience and outcomes, delivering as a strategic partner, and building skills in our communities. The strategy aimed to create a University that is highly connected, permeable, student and customer-focused, business-oriented, strategically aligned and, above all, impactful. We will build our reputation as a sector- leading, flexible, inclusive, enquiry-based and employer informed education, designed around the needs of our students. We have developed our research and knowledge exchange activities, generating impact with reach and significance to benefit our partners and communities. We are a University that always meets its social responsibilities.
To deliver our strategy we have worked to better align our resources, developing and implementing new strategies for our people, technology, finance and estate. We have developed our commercial activities to strengthen and diversify our income. We have developed strategic partnerships, drawing on the advantages of our unique position within Buckinghamshire and our proximity to London. Impact 2022 set the University ambitious targets to be realised in just a few short years. Our aim was to achieve a recurrent annual surplus of 7-10%; underpinned by growth in student numbers to 7,000-7,500 FTE; holding staff costs to less than 50% of income; and liquidity in excess of 150 days. We aimed to improve our reputation to 80th or better in aggregate across league tables. We aspired to achieve TEF Gold, based on NSS scores of better than 85%, and retention and highly skilled employment indicators scoring above benchmark. At the end of 2022 we will formally close Impact 2022 and evaluate its success. Already it is clear that we will meet or come close to meeting many of our most challenging targets. The University’s finances are now very strong, underpinned by dramatic and sector-leading growth in student numbers. Our continuation scores have improved, as have our graduate outcomes, and our position in league tables has risen markedly, currently standing at 99th. Our TEF plans have been interrupted by revisions to the scheme, and of course COVID-19 has also interrupted our aspirations for continuing very strong performance in student satisfaction. Nevertheless, we anticipate summarising Impact 2022 as having been a strongly successful strategy.
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