Institutional Context
Summary
Our mission at Bradford is to drive sustainable social and economic development through outstanding teaching, research and innovation. Our vision is a world of inclusion and equality of opportunity where people want to, and can, make a difference. We want to be known as the place to be to make that difference.
Our Business and Community Engagement strategy governs our knowledge exchange activities. These aim to establish Bradford as a university city, which shares knowledge to improve health, wealth and confidence in the communities we touch.
Driven by values of excellence, inclusion, innovation and trust, we will build on the strengths described in these narratives to reduce health inequalities, grow knowledge-rich employment and develop leaders for Bradford and the world.
Institutional context
The University of Bradford was founded in 1966, with the motto “to give invention light”. With origins in the Bradford Mechanics Institute and located at the epicentre of the Industrial Revolution, our academic development has always been weighted towards applied and vocational subjects and a necessity to engage with communities outside academia.
The pioneering drive in the District’s culture is reflected in our institution’s history: we opened the UK’s first university business school and its first Peace Studies programme; we developed person-centred care for dementia patients as a concept for evidence-led service improvement and care quality assurance. A more poignant link was the establishment of our Centre for Skin Sciences in alliance with the Bradford Royal Infirmary’s Plastic Surgery and Burns Research Unit, itself established following the Valley Parade disaster, initiating a scholarly legacy that continues to grow today.
Our current strategy reflects these connections with place and our institutional strengths. We want to enable people to make a difference; our District is rich with challenges to tackle, and our strengths in applied research and inclusive education represent capability and capacity to solve all manner of problems.
Over the last three years, we have introduced a new University strategy and several focused sub-strategies, including our first ever Business and Community Engagement strategy. This articulates a vision of establishing Bradford as a university city, which shares knowledge to improve health, wealth and confidence in the communities we touch. Its objectives are to shape and deliver knowledge exchange activities which enable the University’s mission to be the place to be for people to belong, thrive and make a difference.
Our strategy is centred on people and values of excellence, inclusion, innovation and trust. We aim to reduce Bradford’s health inequalities locally and share lessons learned globally; to create and fill knowledge-rich jobs, growing productivity and incomes; to show leadership and to develop future leaders for Bradford and the world, fostering pride in our city and the difference we make.
For further information, please send queries to rais@bradford.ac.uk
Local Growth and Regeneration
Summary of approach
We are the University of and for Bradford. Our mission is to drive sustainable social and economic development, through outstanding teaching, research and innovation.
Local growth and regeneration means, to us, partnership working to deliver our Business and Community Engagement vision of improving health, wealth and confidence by enhancing our partners’ innovation, workforce development and capacity to lead.
Bradford is a place with substantial needs to address and our institution’s academic and wider capabilities are strongly rooted here. Similar needs extend across West Yorkshire, which we address independently and in collaboration with others.
Yet our horizons extend far beyond our county. The impact we have, in a place and population of such size and diversity, resonates around the world.
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Aspect 1: Strategy
Bradford is a District with a large, young and diverse population, at the heart of West Yorkshire and the Leeds City Region. Our University’s approach to knowledge exchange (KE) for local growth and regeneration is mainly directed towards improving lives in this part of the North of England.
Bradford is a place with substantial needs to address and our institution’s academic and wider capabilities are strongly rooted here. Similar needs extend across West Yorkshire, which we address independently and in collaboration with others. Much of the available public co-investment in meeting these needs is allocated at the regional level. These pragmatic considerations favour Bradford District and West Yorkshire as most relevant to our local growth and regeneration work.
Still, we are an institution that is international in outlook and activity, with a long history of applied research and KE supporting development across the UK and worldwide. Bradford’s selection as UK City of Culture 2025 and the University’s engagement with this exemplify how our work of local immediacy generates global resonance and impact because of Bradford’s relatively large size and the scale of the challenges we face.
Our academic provision – both research and education – is a mix of largely applied and vocational subjects, which translates into significant problem-solving capability; most of our externally-funded research activity involves non-academic partners. This profile explains our high levels of intellectual property (IP) commercialisation activity relative to research. 80% of our undergraduate degree programmes are professionally accredited.
This is the context for our current business and community engagement strategy (BCES 2020-2025) and its ambition to make Bradford known as a university city. This is rooted in the strength of our interactions with health and care systems, industry (especially digital and manufacturing sectors) and civil society in Bradford and beyond.
Wide-ranging consultation on BCES and continuing stakeholder engagement inform our understanding of strategic need for local growth and regeneration. We have set out societal goals of improving health, wealth and confidence among all the communities with which we engage, starting in Bradford, and enabling partners to innovate, to develop their workforces and otherwise to benefit from our resources, reputation and leadership.
Over the last three years, we have strengthened key enabling capabilities, our offer to business and community partners and our understanding of our partners’ experiences of working with us.
These internal developments took place in a wider context shaped profoundly by the pandemic and the continued diminution of regional public capacity and finance for local growth and regeneration due to national policies. The advent and mainstreaming of the KE Concordat has been beneficial in helping us to shape our institution.
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Aspect 2: Activity
Our 2019-22 activities fall into two categories: operational KE Delivery and, from 2020-21, BCES-driven Improvement.
KE DELIVERY
The outcomes we seek through our BCES are:
Health: better outcomes, lower inequalities
Wealth: more and better knowledge-rich jobs
Confidence: leadership, empowerment, inclusion
The following, selected examples cover mostly locally-focused initiatives: engagement with the health and care system; innovation and employer engagement to drive growth, productivity and graduate prospects; and engagement with civic stakeholders to elevate Bradford.
Evidence that needs were met includes the quantitative outputs of respective activities and the ongoing, sustainable engagement of stakeholders with them.
Health
Workforce observatory: this collaboration pools relevant intelligence health and social care workforce to analyse, plan, forecast, grow and develop the health and social care workforce in an evidence-informed manner. Since April 2021, it has supported the West Yorkshire Integrated Care System and the wider health and care ecosystem. Its main outputs have been: review of recruitment and retention of care workers; scoping review of strategic workforce planning; deep-dive into the ICS’s radiology workforce.
Digital Health Enterprise Zone: DHEZ aims to: deliver services to our local community through a network of partnerships; nurture business enterprise; collaborate with our health, social care and public sector providers; inspire students through research led teaching; and demonstrate excellence in inter-disciplinary digital health research. For example:
Novavax Covid-19 vaccine booster trials led by Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (BTHT).
BTHT’s and Airedale NHS Foundation Trust’s Long Covid clinics, trialling innovative practice and enabling experiential learning for students.
Residency for SMEs and local authority teams, facilitating multi-sector partnerships to progress innovation and business growth.
Simulation space for teaching healthcare professionals.
Experts by Experience: we engage patients, carers and members of the public in the design, conduct and dissemination of health and social care research. Experts by Experience also contribute to the recruitment, learning and assessment of students, offering lived insights to enhance the quality of our health and care taught provision. The groups currently consist of around 180 people, having tripled in size over the last 3 years; we aim to support 300 by 2025. We will recruit people from seldom heard groups and communities and enhance a broader cross-section of our research.
Covid-19 research: the University’s research community responded to the pandemic with a surge in funding applications and contracts with partners. The University also provided internal funding to 21 applied research projects, most of which involved local partners. Detailed here, projects looked at vaccines and vaccination, supporting the NHS and economic recovery, among other topics.
Wealth
Knowledge Transfer Partnerships: In 2019-2022, Bradford hosted 16 KTPs. With one exception, the completed projects were evaluated as “very good” or “outstanding” by Innovate UK. For example, we enabled Leeds-based food manufacturer Rakusens to develop AI-enabled quality control for biscuit-making with benefit to both the company’s performance and its culture.
Effershield: a novel effervescent tablet formulation, Effershield was commercialised in 2022 following several years’ collaborative research with local businesses, Health Innovations and Octopoda Innovations. The invention, from the Centre for Pharmaceutical Engineering Science, is stable at regular atmospheric humidity, by contrast with incumbent technology, opening up environmental benefits and new applications.
Project CAYMAN (Chemistry Assets for Yorkshire MANufacturing) is a European Regional Development Fund part-funded programme which started in 2019 and runs to June 2023 delivering analytical projects and training to Leeds City Region SMEs. The £2.2m programme saw £1.5m capital investment in advanced instrumentation. This is used to deliver free-of-charge innovation projects and training provision. The outputs, including 50+ business interactions, have led to 10+ continuing relationships, and we have enabled new-to-the-market (5) and new-to-the-company products (11).
ASEP: our Accelerated Student Entrepreneurship Programme supports students to create successful commercial and social enterprises in Bradford. The programme fosters team formation, linking home and international students. During the four-month, extracurricular programme, students meet counterparts, develop ideas for joint businesses, and receive start-up support, whilst developing their personal entrepreneurial, internationalisation, and inter-cultural communication skills. Students receive extensive mentoring from experienced entrepreneurs and attend two four-day training workshops, culminating in a presentation pitch to real investors, for real funding to seed a real start-up. Since 2018, 148 students have completed the programme, and 22 business start-ups have been established.
Careers and Employability: 70% of our graduates progress into employment in West Yorkshire and 78-80% who enter employment do so into high-skilled jobs.
We provide high-quality, data- and evidence-informed career education, employability, placement and employment services to students/graduates and employers, and we have shaped and delivered numerous examples of innovative practice. Since 2019, we have developed and delivered employment and skills innovations through the Graduate Workforce Bradford (GWB) project. Working with 13 organisations based regionally, GWB has implemented both structural and individual approaches to address the unemployment and underemployment of graduates, particularly those from ethnic minorities, and the recruitment, skills-gap and diversity challenges of local businesses.
National, international business partnerships: our academic capability contributes to economic growth through national and international partnerships as well as local. For example:
SAFI, a learning partnership between our Automotive Research Centre and manufacturing multinationals including Airbus, Stellantis and Renault.
Centre for Skin Sciences collaborates across UK, Europe and USA. Its published work includes partnerships with Aveda, Phillips and BASF, among others.
Our Polymer Micro- and Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials Engineering teams connect companies local and global with unmatched expertise and capability in materials manufacturing.
Confidence
PERN: the Place-based Economic Recovery Network is an academic led, multi-university network of experts in place-based economic recovery, regeneration and resilience. Convened by Yorkshire Universities in 2020, PERN provides expert engagement with West Yorkshire Combined Authority to support post-pandemic rebuilding. Bradford is a founding member and contributed policy evidence and recommendations on several topics.
The success of PERN led to the establishment of Y-PERN, the Yorkshire and Humber Policy Engagement and Research Network, bringing together all of Yorkshire’s universities and all of its local governments in a federated structure for public policy analysis and innovation. Y-PERN received a £3.9m Research England Development Fund award in late 2022.
Virtual Bradford: in partnership with Bradford Council, the Visualising Heritage team has built a digital clone of the city centre. Due to be made freely available, this 3D-visualisation dataset provides accurate levels of detail of the built environment for various priorities of the Council, including urban planning; traffic management; air quality, flood risk and noise pollution; disaster management planning; and to highlight the heritage of the city, enhancing education, tourism and civic pride.
Virtual Bradford exemplifies the archaeology-research-informed societal impact that led to our receipt of the Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher Education in 2021.
Leadership: our Executive Team are represented on 85 boards, including over 50 within the sub-region (for example, the West Yorkshire Local Economic Partnership Board, West and North Yorkshire Chambers of Commerce, Bradford Health and Wellbeing Board, Bradford Economy Partnership Board). The University also sponsors several significant events in Bradford, including the Bradford Literature Festival, the Unify Festival, and the Bradford Manufacturing Weeks. We are a partner in Bradford City of Culture 2025. Such proactive engagement and partnership working with key strategic and operational organisations clearly demonstrates our responsibility as an anchor institution, commitment to be a civic university, and contribution to placemaking for the region and the communities in which our students live, study, and work.
IMPROVEMENT
External partnership is essential for us to influence health, wealth and confidence. In seeking to improve our partnership working, we focus on:
What we do – our capability and capacity
What we say – our business and community offer
What our partners experience
What we do
We have developed an ontology of BCE activities, defined by the type of benefit that partners derive from working with universities.
Its three top-level categories are innovation, workforce development, and community partnerships and development. There are around twenty sub-categories altogether.
Mapping our capabilities against this framework has enabled us to prioritise and sequence capacity development work over the last two years. To July 2022, we had:
revised our consultancy procedure, targeting the rebuilding of activity.
established university-wide enterprise and entrepreneurship leadership capacity to integrate several pockets of high-impact activity, targeting business assistance and creation.
secured investment in capacity for:
commercial contract administration for innovation work.
growing our network of “experts by experience”.
public engagement.
commenced a review of our capacity for regional economic development.
What we say
We are currently reviewing our business and community offer, having laid the groundwork for integrated, consistent marketing and promotion of partnership through our capacity review.
What our partners experience
Key to local growth and regeneration is our partners’ ability to benefit from our partnerships, to translate the knowledge we share into beneficial, societal impact.
In seeking to optimise outcomes, we identified a need to improve our capacity to listen to our partners in order to improve experiences for everyone. Again, we considered consistency of policy and guidance to offer the surest approach to improvement. We developed a suite of resources called “Working With Partners” based on the stakeholder engagement cycle of the Managing Successful Programmes methodology. Launched in Summer 2022, this takes the form of a Sharepoint site accessible to all University staff and is maintained and improved within the Directorate of Research, Innovation and Engagement. It is designed, among other purposes, to gather actionable insights into partners’ experiences to inform continuous improvement.
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Aspect 3: Results
External communications: we are acting to enhance the consistency and quality of our business and community offer, informed by related work to enhance the University’s brand and identity. Nevertheless, the University’s PR and Communications team already centres a high proportion of its news releases on stories of local growth and regeneration.
Internal communications: our BCES provides a frame for institutional discourse and improvement, which is evident not only in growing KE income as measured by HEBCIS but also a marked improvement in our internal KE Concordat gap analysis from July 2021 to 2022. Performance metrics are considered at the University’s Executive Board (EB) and action taken in consequence.
For example, BCES specified a review of our capacity for “regeneration” projects. This review reported to EB in November 2022, drawing on the last three years’ activities and considering the West Yorkshire Combined Authority’s 2021-25 investment priorities. EB endorsed the “framework for regional economic development” recommended by the review, illustrated below.
Resulting actions: we now pursue local growth and regeneration activities within this framework, which helps us to prioritise commitments to areas where we know we can have impact and where co-investment with external funders is likely.
For example:
Project CAYMAN’s success and alignment with regional priorities means we will prioritise the pursuit of a new, similar intervention with UK Shared Prosperity Fund support.
The GWB project evaluation report, practices developed, and learnings gained have been shared widely with key stakeholders and the HE sector. Evaluation is currently informing the design, development and delivery of practice, e.g. West Yorkshire SME Graduate Development Programme.
Impact: change in our targeted domains of “health” and “confidence” is very hard to attribute rigorously to particular actions or even institutions. However, with respect to “wealth”, our track record of supporting students to progress into high-skilled employment and further study is outstanding. Our student and graduate talent make a significant contribution to the sub-region. The latest HESA Graduate Outcomes Survey 2019/2020 reported 91% of the University’s UK full time graduates progressing to employed or on further studies within 15 months of graduation, with 78% of those progressing into employment going into high skilled jobs.
Ultimately, these activities, communications and impacts all serve the BCES vision of reshaping Bradford as a university city, in which knowledge is shared to bring about local growth and regeneration, and the University’s vision of a world of inclusion and equality of opportunity, where people want to, and can, make a difference.
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Public & Community Engagement
Summary of approach
Bradford’s approach to public and community engagement (PCE) stems from the University’s mission and vision, and is operationalised through the Business and Community Engagement sub-strategy, which aims to strengthen health, wealth and confidence within our communities.
We are the University of and for Bradford, we recognise the impact a university has on its place, and our approach echoes this. We champion working reciprocally with partners to co-design, generate impact and review the benefits we collectively create.
We encourage seldom-heard communities to visit campus; produce research that makes a difference to people living locally; pair academics and artists to communicate research in engaging ways; deliver activities that raise the aspirations of young people; improve graduate job prospects; and develop future entrepreneurs.
Aspect 1: Strategy
In 2019/2020, the University of Bradford reinvigorated its commitment to PCE through the formation of the Business and Community Engagement strategy (BCE). PCE became one of our core delivery mechanisms to realise our University vision, it has a strong resourced delivery plan with associated KPIs that is overseen by University Governance mechanisms.
The BCE strategy focuses on three themes health, wealth and confidence which respond to the City’s distinctive mixture of complex challenges and significant opportunities for growth. We have aligned our strategic approach (Image 1) to these themes and the needs of the city with key priorities including maintaining strategic partnerships, enhancing pride, and co-designing solutions that make a difference to our lives. Prioritising equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) is fundamental to our engagement approach - we make our diversity count - undertaking Equality Impact Assessments to ensure projects/partnerships are fully inclusive.
Image 1: Strategic Approach
Image 2: Stakeholder Engagement
EDI extends to our stakeholder engagement (image 2), which has a broad reach. We carefully consider who we engage with so that our values, activities and overarching objectives are aligned. A partnership proforma captures this, we have developed an internal Working with Partners toolkit (Image 3) that guides us on how to identify and maintain partnerships. We operate the cycle in the image presented below.
Image 3: Working with Partners Toolkit Cycle
As below, we have organised ourselves differently to deliver this strategy with high level accountability through executive sponsorship to distinct workstreams delivering key priorities.
Image 4: Governance Structure
Supported by our Programme Management Team, we use reporting mechanisms to monitor deliverables, outcomes and outputs and reach targets. These are reported to our Executive Team through reports, presentations and engagement events.
A key workstream is the Civic Engagement Working Group with institutional representatives. This group has defined our approach to PCE, which has led to new strategic investments of an enhanced fund to sponsor local activity; a dedicated manager to lead public engagement with a support officer; enhanced team to deliver public and patient involvement; and a seed fund to enable staff to test new engagement ideas before applying for larger grants. The benefits of this investment will be evident in 2023-24 whereby our ‘front door’ for communities will be even more porous.
Aspect 2: Support
Supporting excellent engagement practice has led to a concerted effort in raising awareness of the benefits of PCE for our students, staff and academics. With targeted social media and enhanced web content, our communities are better informed of our opportunities for collaboration. Sharing excellent engagement practice has occurred through case studies, showcase events and public engagement festivals (such as UNIfy and Being Human).
UoB works with The Conversation to help academics advance their skills in writing for the general public. We also have expertise to support academics to translate their research for public consumption through public engagement event support, media training, communication and presentation skills. This support has enabled a stronger community of staff to form, who in turn network and share engagement opportunities.
The relationships between UoB and our publics are not based on assumptions. We are committed to meaningful cocreation and involve and engage our publics at many different levels to really understand the potential of our collaborations. For example, each of our taught programmes have a dedicated advisory board with representatives from the business and community sectors. We are deliberate in ensuring our senior staff participate in a range of strategic developments in the private, public, third sectors and the Local Authority. These mechanisms enable UoB to truly understand the needs of our communities and respond with purpose and intent.
Our students are supported to engage with our communities through volunteering opportunities, projects and placements. Supported by academics, they also run Law , Physiotherapy and Eye Clinics.
As our community of staff experts in public engagement grows, so too does the recognition and reward for their work. We recognise the value of their work through the allocation of workload and pathways for promotion through the Bradford Academic, and through celebrating success with awards such as the Vice-Chancellor’s Outstanding Achievers Award for Engagement.
Aspect 3: Activity
Our key programmes of activity stems from our strategy where we share knowledge to strengthen health, wealth and confidence within our communities.
Confidence
Being named City of Culture 2025 is a game changer for the city - a huge boost of confidence for the people that live here and to the economic, social and cultural regeneration our city needs. As a strategic partner of Bradford 2025, we remain committed through to its legacy period. In 2020 we launched the Bradford Producing Hub which supports local creative talent, develops a local arts workforce and partners with communities across Bradford to test and create live performances. Our Theatre in the Mill (TiM) supports and creates art that represents the narrative of people in the city and region. TiM latest project Bussing Out is an immersive experience using oral history to tell the experiences of South Asian, West Indian and African children who migrated to Britain in 60-70s. This project now works with five home schooled Muslim families to further understand their studies through co-creative methods of practice.
The University has created innovative ways to encourage seldom heard communities to visit campus, attend events and hear about research at the University through initiatives like the UNIfy Festival, Research Matters Radio programme in collaboration with BCB Radio, Café Scientifique with the National Science and Media Museum, the Young in Covid Project with the Khidmat Centre and our partnership with Bradford Literature Festival. Central to the creation of these initiatives is embedding communities in the design of their content. In 2022, the UNIfy Festival Community Open Day was co-created with our community partners to provide an interactive way for people to find out about university research. The Open Day was delivered with 14 district partners, attracted over 500 attendees and created a ‘science badge’ in partnership with West Yorkshire Scouts.
Queen’s Anniversary Prize 2022 winner, Virtual Bradford, is a high-resolution digital twin of the city of Bradford. As one of the first open data digital twins, it will help transform how Bradford MBC collaborates on planning decisions, air quality, flood risk and traffic management. Importantly, it helps transform how people interact with the city, enabling communities to explore their identity, the place where they live and how different people’s stories feed into the heritage of that place. To engage young people in this project, an artist-in-residence works with two schools to deliver art activities as part of their curriculum. The use of the art, digital imagery and the children’s voices will become part of a display exhibited at schools and UoB.
As part of our Covid-19 response, UoB launched a Maths tutoring programme targeted at Y11 pupils who were bordering GCSE level 3-4. Delivered by our trained students, with wrap around support including free meals, this provision enabled pupils to outperform their predicted grade expectations by at least one level. This approach is now embedded in our Access and Participation Plan and features in the Wolfson Research Centre.
Health
The University’s growing ‘experts by experience’ movement uses the lived experiences of patients and carers to support the development of teaching and research in applied Health Studies. We use our experts and their feedback to shape our strategic approach, as such this has become an institutional model of engagement.
Our innovative research in diversity and dementia led to the launch of the ADAPT study - the first evidence-based toolkit for South Asian families to navigate the dementia care path. South Asian families are less likely to receive the support they require, the research was cocreated though evaluation workshops with South Asian families, healthcare professionals and community groups to produce culturally sensitive materials for families and healthcare professionals to use and provide more equitable services.
The ‘Shaping research into healthcare improvements’ project used local artists as community connectors to build trust with seldom heard communities in our locality to enable them to share their healthcare needs to co-produce research in this area. The project produced a portal to facilitate involvement in research and a toolkit for university academic staff to better engage with existing community assets for co-production. Again, this project has influenced our strategic approach to PCE, and was shortlisted for a Times Higher Award in 2022.
In collaboration with Born in Bradford and schools across Bradford, FUNMOVES is a one-hour PE test that can enable teachers to identify children with a ‘hidden physical disability’ movement skills deficiency that inhibits children from engaging fully in education. The research involved 970 school children from across the Bradford district and will be transformative for the children and our education and health systems.
Wealth
Graduate Workforce Bradford was established to improve the job prospects of graduates, particularly from ethnic minority backgrounds, across the district. Our research indicates that BAME graduates are less likely to progress into graduate high skilled employment compared to their white peers, with Covid-19 exacerbating such disparities. The project leveraged partnership approaches around business development, graduate talent pool, community events and action research. It implemented both structural and individual approaches to address unemployment and underemployment. Furthermore, innovative practice has been developed with the formation of the Bradford Inclusive Employer Network with 100 business members and a South Asian Discussion Forum involving community ambassadors who have helped drive the project.
To support covid recovery, the School of Management and SAS led an award-winning joint digital skills programme. SAS STEP is a free e-learning programme that offers the chance to learn data skills to increase employment outcomes. The pilot was offered to people seeking employment, facing redundancy, self-employed and our graduates. It re-skilled our city’s workforce and equipped them with vital data and analytics skills and that are needed for post-pandemic in-demand jobs. We led the evaluation and have taken the project from pilot to a national programme.
Finally, the New Dawn initiative is an accelerated entrepreneurship programme to support refugees and asylum seekers in the Bradford community to develop business ideas. With mentoring and skills development workshops it culminates in a real ‘Dragon’s Den’ investor forum.
Aspect 4: Enhancing practice
We are outcomes driven, working to share knowledge to strengthen health, wealth and confidence in the city and our communities. The BCE strategy outlines the objectives and KPIs that we want to achieve. We scope these strategic objectives at the start of all public engagement activity, whether this is a new programme, festival or cocreation activity. This ensures the data we collect during and post the activity is aligned, enabling us to extrapolate feedback, themes and areas of improvement. We always collect feedback that enables us to understand the impact of the activity as well as the experience itself. This allows for thorough evaluations to be undertaken such as the UNIfy evaluation (Image 5), Graduate Workforce Bradford.
Image 5: UNIfy Evaluation: Headline Figures
We have useful examples to evidence our evaluation practice. One example is the contribution we make to the Wolfson Centre for Applied Health Research, namely our work around patient involvement. We piloted programmes to engage better with people who live in areas of multiple deprivation by developing trust to support engagement practice. One project has produced a portal to facilitate involvement in our research and produced a toolkit for university academic staff to engage better with communities through their organisations, staff and services. This co-produced activity has enabled us to evaluate our activity in line with our strategic priorities for public engagement, as well as advance them.
Measuring effectiveness is the last stage on the University’s Working with Partners Toolkit, where staff can review templates to evaluate their activity. We undertake strategic annual reviews of our large-scale partnership activity to ensure our shared values are aligned and the right level of academic engagement, resources and assets are provided to ensure joint success. We have developed a Stakeholder Survey that we encourage all parties we partner with to complete to capture how effective the partnership has been and inform our staff and students of best practice to improve our publics experience.
A consistent institutional approach to evaluation practice of PCE activity is in development, building on the excellent pockets of practice to date. We are working towards an evaluation guidance framework to be adopted by all faculties in 2023-24.
Aspect 5: Building on success
When our BCE strategy was launched, we developed a staged implementation plan. Two years in, great strides have been made in realising our strategic PCE goals.
There is a much greater sense that we are a university of and for the city of Bradford. We have advanced awareness of the value, benefits and impact we can make by involving our communities where mutual and reciprocal activity can take place. We have built and sustained new strategic partnerships reaching new audiences, developed new approaches to co-designing solutions that make a difference to our lives and enhanced pride through supporting transformational moments, such as winning the city of culture designation for 2025. We have secured new investment in public engagement staffing resource which will enable greater staff and student support to elevate their practice. Finally, we have created new opportunities to embed public engagement through new festivals, collaborations and partnerships.
We have disseminated our achievements by reporting and presenting to the University Council, Court and Assemblies, all of which have representatives from across our communities. In addition, we have delivered bespoke showcase events for our staff and students to share active case studies and supplemented these events with fresh videos highlighting innovative engagement with research. Regular executive level reports have provided rich content on activity as well as measurement against KPIs. Such achievements have led to shortlisting of awards and case studies at a national level.
We have reflected on our experiences and embedded learning into future delivery. Launched in 2021, the UNIfy Festival was co-created with staff, students and strategic partners. Regarded a success, the real impact was to engage seldom heard communities in Bradford. In 2022, we established a critical friends group including representatives from our staff, students, partners alumni, community groups in the city and from the public. The group enabled the delivery of a more diverse and co-created programme, which attracted new audiences from seldom heard communities. The rigorous evaluation practices demonstrated through the UNIfy Festival and Graduate Workforce Bradford, form the foundations of our developing institutional approach to evaluating engagement activities.
Confident in our strategy and with strong partnerships in the city and region, we have begun a series of cocreation events with new community representatives to explore how we can create joint projects to meet shared needs. Having witnessed the success of these projects with our management students, we are expanding this endeavour to other disciplines across our programmes. In doing this, these partners are encouraged to provide constructive feedback on how we engage their stakeholders.
In embedding PCE we have seen an increased demand for student volunteering, student led community projects wanting to make a difference in the city, and a drive for engagement with the city around arts and culture with the forthcoming city of culture year. This has created the foundation for our strategic goals to be further advanced in the coming years.
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