Universities are crucial to sparking growth and opportunity, by bringing together student populations, research partners, local businesses, and employers to create vibrant communities, jobs, and opportunity across the UK. This series of briefings takes a look at how universities are generating growth and opportunity across the nine regions of…

Universities are crucial to sparking growth and opportunity, by bringing together student populations, research partners, local businesses, and employers to create vibrant communities, jobs, and opportunity across the UK. This series of briefings takes a look at how universities are generating growth and opportunity across the nine regions of…

Universities are crucial to sparking growth and opportunity, by bringing together student populations, research partners, local businesses, and employers to create vibrant communities, jobs, and opportunity across the UK. This series of briefings takes a look at how universities are generating growth and opportunity across the nine regions of…

University-community engagement has been implemented by an increasing number of universities across the world, in a period characterized by growing international competition. The growth of interest in university-community engagement has led to multiple definitions of this term and a high level of complexity in defining what it entails. Using a…

In more fluid higher education environments, the concept of third space has been developed to explore the activities of groups of staff who do not necessarily fit formal institutional descriptors. This paper draws on qualitative data from 26 respondents, in eight UK universities, who described significant elements of their work as occurring…

Purpose: Building on the concepts of learning communities of practice, the paper aims to evaluate their application within degree apprenticeships (DAs) to support pedagogic engagement and inclusive education within a university setting. Design/methodology/approach: A case study of an existing B2B sales degree apprenticeship reviewed relevant…

Students' perceptions towards synchronous and asynchronous online delivery modes of three engineering courses, in a large UK university is conceptualised, inspired by the Community of Inquiry theoretical framework. Using a qualitative methodology, 76 written student narratives were analysed. An overwhelming focus on the elements that helped them…

Universities are necessarily implicated in processes of globalisation and neoliberalisation. But this also finds an expression in the ways that they operate in the cities in which they are located. They are always located "in" place, but the question remains whether they can be understood to be of the places in which they find…

The study explores how boundary-spanning is carried out to further community engagement in 15 universities of differing sizes/ages across the United Kingdom. Fifteen interviewees participated in a series of four semi-structured interviews, aged between 35-50 and with a first degree (with almost half with an MSc). One third were women. All managed…

This article draws on research undertaken as part of a Collective Biography project generated by a group of activists and lecturers teaching and researching in youth and community work (YCW). Collective Biography (CB) is an approach to research in which participants work productively with memory and writing to generate collective action orientated…

This report sets out a bold package of reform to stabilise, mobilise and then maximise the contribution of UK universities to economic growth and widening opportunity for all. It has a single aim: to create a UK university sector that is better in ten years' time than it is today. This blueprint is evidence-based, action-oriented and consciously…

Academic engagement with small business and entrepreneurship was facilitated by the availability of European Union (EU) funding, which also stimulated the emergence of a small business and entrepreneurship (SBE) 'community of practice'. Gradually, the SBE community developed into a 'landscape of practice' as small business research moved towards…

This paper reports on an international collaborative study that investigated how students from rural contexts negotiate the transition to university, and how prior cultural and educational experiences influence their higher education trajectories. A qualitative, participatory methodology was adopted, centred on co-researcher narratives, digital…

The ongoing pandemic has affected all aspects of human life globally. Universities have faced significant challenges in continuing their educational and research activities while at the same time becoming more visible due to their work on identifying treatments, developing vaccines, understanding the impact of the pandemic and exploring the ways…

Sustainability is a lifestyle designed for permanence. Sustainability is the comparatively simpler idea, which can be explained in purely descriptive terms as the capacity of any given system to exist and reproduce on a long-term basis. The development adds a value judgment by implying the desired evolution of human society. Sustainability in…