- This blog is by Dr Clive Winters, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Strategy and Governance) at Coventry University Group.
- Today is Josh Freeman’s last day at HEPI. Josh has run the HEPI blog alongside his other duties for most of the past two years and has been a fabulous colleague. We will miss him and wish him all the best for the future and in his new role at the Office for Students.
When levelling up was popular in political and media circles, it was a source of bemusement to some of us in Higher Education. After all, universities as anchor institutions have been helping level up our communities and delivering economic impact for decades, or even longer.
Coventry University Group is now a global education provider, but its roots go back to 1843 when entrepreneurs and industrialists created Coventry School of Design to deliver a skilled workforce. Nearly two centuries later, we have never lost that core ethos of meeting local needs and we continue to work with businesses to provide job-ready graduates with the skills and creative thinking to improve their communities.
Our emblem is a Phoenix, chosen because of the city’s long history of regeneration and rebirth – a story only possible through our ongoing commitment and agility to evolve with the city and deliver the skills and innovation ecosystem needed to raise and maintain aspirations, mobility and prosperity. We have always been of the city and for the city of Coventry and have transplanted our mission of creating better futures into more cities and regions with campuses in London, Scarborough and Poland.
Education is based on place and each location is different, with social, economic and geographical factors driving local need and the gaps in skills, health and prosperity that we can help to fill. Our research and knowledge exchange activity complements our excellence in teaching to allow us to operate as a collaborative partner of choice, developing holistic solutions for local communities. We deliver technical, professional and vocational education and research that impacts on people and places. We co-create our courses with employers, our research is undertaken in collaboration and partnership, and knowledge exchange activity is designed with businesses not for them.
When trying to capture this in an economic impact report on our activity in Coventry, we assumed the figures would be large, impressive and surprising to some but would not tell the full story of how we contribute to place and society. So, we asked the consulting team at Hatch to look at our wider impacts and not just add up the pounds.
In simple economic terms, our main campus had a gross quantifiable economic footprint of 6,730 FTE jobs and £320m in Gross Value Added (GVA) in Coventry (2021/22). One in every 20 jobs in the city can be traced back to our presence. For every four direct on-campus jobs, a further three are supported across the city through the multiplier effects generated by the Group’s activity.
But that doesn’t calculate the true extent to which we are woven into the economic and social fabric of Coventry, helping the city adapt and grow for 180 years. Our 5,000 health students on placements populate the teams in the wards and clinics of our local hospital, working alongside our alumni in the health and care sector in Coventry. The Research Centre for Care Excellence is a partnership with University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire (UHCW) empowering staff to develop ideas to make ‘patient first’ improvements. Patients feel the benefits, almost certainly without ever knowing the role we played. We are also working with UHCW and other NHS bodies to use our city centre estate to bring health services closer to patients and are the first university to be co-located in a Community Diagnostic Centre. Real people benefit from our work.
Coventry was the home of bicycle design and manufacturing before becoming the UK’s motor city and is now vying to position itself at the forefront of the net zero transport revolution. Many of the brightest and best car designers and engineers in the UK have Coventry degrees, and we continue to meet the evolving needs of the city – upskilling 1,200 JLR staff though an electrification development programme and conducting 34 net zero collaborative research projects in just two years. We are moving the city forwards into a brighter, better future.
The song We’ll Live and Die in These Towns seems an unusual choice for any place to have as an (unofficial) anthem, as it speaks of desperation and resignation to the fate of the working classes. But it has been embraced, not least by supporters of Coventry City, possibly because it somehow transmits a strong sense of identity based on where you are from, of place. Alongside the defiant chorus, the lyrics include the line, ‘nothing ever happened on its own’. People have to make things happen and Coventry is a city where we make things happen, but we don’t do that on our own. We do it with someone and for someone in collaboration and partnership as an anchor institution, that is the key to real economic impact.