Tag: partnership

  • The UK-Ukraine 100 year partnership and its commitment to educational leadership

    The UK-Ukraine 100 year partnership and its commitment to educational leadership

    As we are marking three years since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and 11 years since the start of the Revolution of Dignity, it is impossible not to notice the scars and the suffering but also Ukraine’s resolve to continue rebuilding, innovating and even thriving among adversity.

    Support from the UK remains unwavering. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Prime Minster Keir Starmer have signed a 100-year partnership agreement between Ukraine and the United Kingdom with historic significance to strengthen the ties between the two nations. It includes two “pillars” with items of particular significance to the education community: Pillar 8, focused on partnerships in science, technology, and innovation; and Pillar 9, focused on harnessing socio-cultural ties. These two pillars outline the development of new and the strengthening of existing links between higher education institutions and academic communities. It is this kind of constructive collaboration that creates hope against a background of the recent volte-face of the US towards Ukraine.

    Twinning and British Council

    Building on the success of the HE Twinning scheme, launched at the start of the full scale invasion, led by Cormack Consultancy with support from Universities UK International (UUKi), the 100 year agreement seeks to twin 100 schools in Ukraine and the United Kingdom to establish partnerships between learners and educators in secondary and primary education.

    The British Council, a key funder and supporter of many educational initiatives, will continue to organise English language courses for Ukrainian civil servants and contribute to the professional development of English language teachers. In a more directed effort, the British Council has funded expertise exchange visits for senior leaders from Ukrainian universities to UK universities, and repeat-funded collaborations coming forth from such visits.

    In our own case at Warwick, the visits from senior colleagues from V.N.Karazin Kharkiv National University have led to a flourishing research and expertise exchange on developing new forms of teacher training, educational leadership development, and trauma informed teaching and leadership practices. An international conference later this year will allow others in the HE sector to benefit from the insights the collaboration has brought forward.

    Building leadership capacity for educational reforms

    The UK has also made a commitment to “support education recovery and reform ambitions through policy exchanges, technical assistance, leadership training, education partnerships, and sharing best practice including on funding systems.” Warwick’s Leadership for Educational Transformation (LET) programme, founded in partnership with the Ukrainian Leadership Academy, has showed the significance and impact of such programmes on individual educational leaders as well as on building the cadre of educational leadership in Ukraine.

    Programmes such as the Leaders of University Transformation for Ukraine’s Reinvention (LUTUR) Programme and the Training Programme for Academic Managers due to start in April 2025 have also sent significant ripples across the community. Under the 100-year partnership, British universities are also expected to expand educational offerings in Ukraine, including through pilot projects in transnational education.

    Science, innovation and entrepreneurship

    There is a commitment to “seek opportunities to collaborate in science, technology and innovation” including interest in developing AI and its related governance and regulation, building on Ukraine’s advancement in e-governance, transferring the experience into the gov.uk wallet (with, for example, an initial move to a digital driving licence).

    Higher education in Ukraine is growing its stake in the rebuilding of the country and in innovation. There are many lessons that can be learnt from the UK experience, and indeed, thanks to the UK International Development and the Good Governance Fund, Kyiv Aviation Institute (KAI) will become one of the first universities in Ukraine to establish a science park, paving the way for the universities to become hubs for innovation where science, industry and education will join forces to develop Ukraine’s innovation potential. Having officially presented the concept of KAI Science Park at the end of January as part of the Win-Win 2030 strategy KAI will focus its research in deep tech, remotely piloted/unmanned aerial vehicles), cybersecurity, defence tech, AI, machine learning, materials, robotics and engineering.

    There is also much to exchange in the entrepreneurship education space. Whilst the UK has some incredible success stories around knowledge transfer, student and regional entrepreneurship development, the European Startup National Alliance (ESNA), in 2024 ranked Ukraine fourth among 24 European countries (after Lithuanian, Spain and France) exceeding the average by 12 per cent for supporting start ups, enabled by its sophisticated digital ecosystem.

    Other partnerships between the academic communities mentioned in the two pillars include space, increasing diversity in science, and particularly focusing on women in STEM, women’s rights more broadly, student mobility, sports and culture, youth programmes.

    Of critical value is also medicine and healthcare innovation. As Ukraine faces unprecedented medical challenges due to the war, there is a pressing need to build expertise in hospital management, medical training, and rehabilitation – fields that remain underdeveloped. Collaboration between universities, research institutions, and healthcare professionals can lay the foundation for new academic programmes, joint research initiatives, and knowledge exchange in areas such as med tech, mental health, and especially trauma treatment.

    A journey of 100 years

    From our own experience working on the LET programme, we have seen the sense of purpose colleagues experience from collaborations between Ukrainian and UK institutions. Moreover, following Brexit and the current recasting of geopolitical alliances, the UK’s commitment to contributing positively to Europe may look different than before, but this is a prime opportunity to renew our commitment to prosperity and peace on the continent. With the financial squeeze on many UK institutions, we must also remain pragmatic as securing projects, funding and commitments is becoming harder. Seeking opportunities for win-win collaborations will be the way forward.

    For instance:

    • Exchanging guest lecturing opportunities to offer different perspectives in the classroom and support each other with developing international ties, presence and impact.
    • Mentoring on all aspects of academic careers, building on the success of Science for Ukraine.
    • Co-developing and seeking out Ukrainian cases to be used in the curriculum. The Ukrainian Catholic University Center for Leadership, for instance, champions and disseminates Ukrainian leadership research.
    • Exchanging data access opportunities to build mutually beneficial research dissemination partnerships.

    Education has always been and will remain a catalyst for peace, and unity during tough times can help to nurture hope. Educational partnerships are making a tangible difference. And whilst there are many challenges ahead of our two education communities, the shared commitment to building resilience outlined in the 100-year partnership makes one thing clear: we must continue standing with Ukraine, as there is much to be done and to be gained from working together.

    In 2024 the authors coordinated a series on Ukraine, the UK and higher education on Wonkhe: you can see all the articles in the series and our coverage of the conflict in Ukraine here.

    Source link

  • A sea change in student partnership

    A sea change in student partnership

    A few years back now, someone who worked for one of Scotland’s sector agencies liked to draw a comparison when talking about student-centredness.

    They said that conservation charities passionately place wildlife at the heart of everything they do, but crucially would never put representatives of flora and fauna on committees (imagine the mess).

    Therefore, my erstwhile and esteemed colleague would argue, when institutional leaders proudly claim to be “student-centred” it reveals nothing about how they involve students in shaping their experiences.

    Of course, you can diligently monitor wildlife and use your data to make good decisions, in a manner not dissimilar to learning analytics in education, but the difference is that students can then go on to be a part of conversations in a way that wildlife never can.

    Waterproof papers

    My mind was cast back to this parallel when I saw the recent news that the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS), one of our partners here at the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI), has put The Ocean on its governing body.

    It’s a move that SAMS’ Director Nick Owens admits “could be seen as trivial or ‘greenwashing’”, and we might imagine other specialist institutions making similar gestures in the disciplines they so richly embody and advance.

    For instance a conservatoire could put “Music” on their board, or an agricultural college “The Land”.

    Nick explains further, however:

    The Ocean is clearly a metaphor in this context and cannot represent itself in human terms.”

    That point is vital because, if we go back to our parallel, SAMS has already gone much further with its other main cause – students.

    Like all constituent parts of UHI and indeed our university overall, SAMS has student membership on its governing body, not to just sit there and wave like the ocean might, or to flap about disruptively like a bird among a wildlife charity’s trustees.

    Instead, we expect of student governors an informed, constructive and active contribution.

    As my colleague Aimee Cuthbert wrote on Wonkhe a year ago, we have a major project that is making that student membership truly effective and impactful across UHI’s complex governance arrangements.

    On a basic level we want to build on national guidelines such as Scotland’s codes of good governance for colleges and universities and support packages such as those from the College Development Network.

    The wet room

    In our own unique context we want to make sure UHI’s governing bodies do not merely talk about students as an abstract concept or worthy concern, and instead have them in the room to provide meaningful input about students’ diverse and complex experiences and the implications for students of the difficult decisions that must be made.

    That means a lot of work with those involved in our governing bodies, exploration of the key issues on our boards’ desks at a time of change, and helping our local officers impact on their individual partner governing bodies while also working together as a team to impact on decisions that are UHI-wide.

    A core part of our project is therefore that very human process of communication – supporting the networking, sharing practice and informal relationship building that makes student governors truly a part of the process in a way that an ocean can’t be.

    So, when someone tells you their institution is student-centred, that’s arguably the very least we might expect, and in isolation such a declaration risks viewing students in the same way that others might view wildlife.

    The Ocean as governor, therefore, is not only a striking metaphor for SAMS’ important mission, but has added power in benchmarking our perceptions of those we claim to be here for – reminding us that there’s a big difference between caring about students and actively involving them as partners.

    Source link

  • New models of international partnership

    New models of international partnership

    Universities face a double jeopardy: a changing geopolitical world order and looming financial sustainability issues borne out of an over-reliance on international student fees.

    In some cases, it is estimated that up to 70 per cent of a university’s income is based on international fees. The dependence on international income is accentuated by loss of European markets following Brexit.

    The cumulative impact of fees, geopolitics, global competition, and domestic tensions around immigration have all added to a complicated picture that requires skilful navigation and innovative ways of working.

    There is cause for optimism, though. The Labour government has put universities at the heart of its international relations by making a commitment in their manifesto for universities to lead soft power and influence. The focus from Labour on putting universities at the heart of their mission for economic growth is welcome and recognises the critical role that universities play in developing partnerships internationally.

    To rise to this challenge, we need to rethink the way we do things – instead of imperialistic we need to be realistic. We must adopt new models of international collaboration, cognisant of the changing global order, to survive and thrive.

    Inspiration from India

    According to the latest Census data, Leicester has the largest population of people with Indian ethnicity outside of London. The links between our city and India run deeply through our culture, history, society and economy. What happens in India is relevant to us in Leicester and we can learn from one another.

    With this in mind, we have developed a partnership with one of India’s largest healthcare providers, Apollo Healthcare. It is a wide-ranging collaboration that will include the launch of a new joint Centre for Digital Health and Precision Medicine, bilateral higher education courses, and professional pathways that will address skills gaps in the NHS and India.

    This model combines shared research strengths for mutually beneficial outcomes that are applicable in both India and Leicester. Making the most of complementary areas of expertise, identifying shared aims, and finding areas of commonality are the key to this more reciprocal international model.

    Centre for Digital Health and Precision Medicine

    The Centre will harness the research strengths of the partners and the extensive longitudinal patient database of the Apollo Hospitals Group. This will help to deliver improved population health with a global perspective through better disease prediction and prevention, improved and earlier detection, diagnosis and management of multiple acute and long-term conditions in hospital and community settings. It will make a tangible difference to improving the health of communities in India and the UK, including local communities with Indian heritage in Leicester.

    In a globalised world, we must recognise that we can’t be the experts in every area of research. Truly two-way partnerships can help us to learn from leading experts overseas, combining our shared research expertise for mutual benefit.

    Working across continents with access to large population data also transforms the breadth, depth and quality of outcomes for our research. High volumes of diverse data allow researchers to answer more intricate questions and with greater speed – ensuring that outcomes can be translated into clinical practice sooner.

    Data-led and industry backed approach

    The importance of data in modern healthcare cannot be underestimated. Researchers at the University of Leicester were the first to identify the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on ethnic minority communities because of ethnically diverse data available to us in Leicester. We hope this partnership with Apollo will produce equally significant findings, supporting the partners’ shared commitment to inclusive and equitable healthcare.

    Another aspect of the partnership which marks it out as distinctive is that it is not just with another university – rather the University is working with an industry partner and the NHS. Apollo will have input into the curriculum – providing relevance in a globalised world – and in partnership with the University Hospitals of Leicester it will help address the shortfall in health professional skills and nurses and doctors. It is unusual for a university to work in partnership in this way with industry and public services – but it speaks to the need for universities to develop new approaches to partnership working that seek genuine change and are not driven by a narrow self-interest in student recruitment.

    Genuine partnership

    Our partnership is grounded in shared values where the benefits for both institutions as well as their local communities and countries are clearly defined. It represents a new type of international engagement that is mutually beneficial (recognising that many overseas partners have knowledge that is better than ours) – not a colonial attitude. It is grounded in the needs of industry – ensuring that despite changes in politics the skills and research requirements – partnerships will continue to be informed by industry and evolve quickly. It is also, most importantly, based on long term commitments between universities and communities in places that go beyond individual student preference and geopolitical factors. We hope that put together these factors and this new model will be better placed to stand the test of time.

    It is vital that universities in the UK adopt similar approaches to further demonstrate our importance and value to the UK – responding to the priorities set out by the Secretary of State for Education for universities to support economic growth at the same time as developing international links and contributing to the prosperity of our local communities.

    Delivering new and equitable models of partnership does not come without policy challenges and it is important that we consider them as a sector. We can no longer engage with the rest of the world with a ‘what is in it for me attitude’ or expect that partners will always deal with us on our terms. There are legitimate questions around which legal and governance frameworks are utilised, how research funders can work across multiple countries effectively and equitable funding and commercial arrangements that all require a shift in mindset and policy in the UK.

    None of these challenges are insurmountable, though, and they can all be addressed with the right approach. With new models of partnerships that are grounded in shared values and mutually beneficial, we can make a huge difference in the UK and globally.

    The new Centre for Digital Health and Precision Medicine will be led by Professor Sir Nilesh Samani from the University of Leicester, also the former Medical Director of the British Heart Foundation, and Dr Sujoy Kar, Chief Medical Information Officer & Vice President at the Apollo Hospitals Group. Its vision is to advance healthcare and its delivery through the development and deployment of digital health and precision medicine solutions using advanced analytics.

    Source link

  • Exploring the explosion in franchise and partnership activity

    Exploring the explosion in franchise and partnership activity

    There’s a clear need for more regulatory oversight of franchise and partnership teaching arrangements, but – as regulators are finding – there’s no easy way to track which students are being registered, taught, or physically located at which provider.

    Knowing where students study feels like a straightforward matter – indeed “where do HE students study” is one of the top level questions posed in HESA’s Student open data collection. If you click on that, it takes you to an up-to-date (2022-23 academic year) summary of student numbers by registering provider.

    But as we’ve learned from concerns raised by the Office for Students, the Student Loans Company, the National Audit Office, and (frankly) Wonkhe there is a bit more to it than that. And it is not currently possible to unpick this to show the number of students at each provider – for any given value of “at” other than registering – using public data. But we can do it for the number of courses.

    The forgotten open data set

    Yes – I’ve started the year abusing the Unistats open data release (it’s the only open data release that lets you find details of courses was the clue). And you sort of, kind of, can unpick some of these relationships using it. After a fashion.

    It is worth unpacking our terms a bit:

    • A student’s registration provider is the provider that returns that student as a part of their official data returns. If the registration provider has degree awarding powers, this is generally the provider that awards the qualification the student is working towards
    • A student’s teaching provider is the provider where a student is actually taught – in the instances where this is different to the registering provider this usually happens via a partnership arrangement of some sort.
    • A student’s location provider is the actual place a student is taught – usually, this is the same as a teaching provider, but not always – for example a “university centre” based at an FE college counts as the university in question doing the teaching, but the location would be the FE provider that hosts the centre.
    • We’ve also got to deal with the idea of an awarding provider, the place that actually awards the degree the student is working towards. In the main this is the same as the registering provider, but where the registering provider can’t award the degree in question it will be someone else by arrangement.

    How does this appear in Unistats? You are probably familiar with the notion of the UK Provider Reference Number (UKPRN): a unique identifier for educational settings. In the unistats data we get something called PUBUKPRN, which identifies where a course is primarily taught. We get something called UKPRN, which identifies where students on a given course are registered. And we get LOCUKPRN, which identifies the location a student is taught at – where this a location with its own UKPRN that is not the same as the PUBUKPRN.

    Limits to sector growth visualisation

    What’s missing – we don’t get a UKPRN for the awarding body. Not in public data. It is collected (OTHERINST) and used on the Discover Uni website but it is not published for me to mess with. Not yet, anyway.

    So what I can show you is the number of courses at each combination of registering, teaching, and location provider. This shows instances where students may be registered at one provider but taught at another (your classic partnership arrangement), and the evolving practice of declaring unilateral branch campuses (where students are registered and taught at one provider, but located at a different one).

    That latter one explains the explosion of London “campuses” that area really an independent provider (that may cater to multiple institutions in a similar way). The whole thing gives some indication of where a given provider is involved in franchise/partnership activity – but only where this is shown on unistats.

    What I found

    First up – sorted by registering provider. You can filter by registering provider if you don’t want the whole list (whyever not?), and I’ve included a wildcard filter for course titles. This is instead of a subject filter – each course in unistats is meant to have a subject associated with it, but this tends not to happen for the kinds of courses we are interested in here:

    [Full screen]

    And the same thing, sorted (and searchable) by teaching provider:

    [Full screen]

    Many limitations, but a space to keep asking

    The limitations here are huge. What we really want is the number of students registered on each course – we can get this at various levels of aggregation but not reliably at a single course, single cohort level. HESA’s policy of rounding and aggregating to avoid identifying individual students (and of course the historic nature of much of the data presented on unistats) means that most of the information in the data set (entry qualification), NSS, graduate destinations is combined across multiple years and numerous related subjects.

    In the usual unistats fashion “courses” are a unique combination of qualification aim, title, and mode for each location. So the handful of remaining providers that do defined “joint” degrees (two or more subjects) look like they are spectacularly busy. And, as always, the overall quality of data isn’t brilliant so there will be stuff that doesn’t look right (pro tip: yes tell me, but also tell HESA).

    Here then, is a partial explanation as to why regulators and others have been slow to respond to the growth in franchise, partnership, and other joint provisions: almost by definition the novel things providers are up to don’t show up in data collection. That’s kind of the point.

    But is a simple list of available courses, where they are taught, what (and whose) awards they lead to, what subjects they cover, and how many students are on each too much to ask? It appears so.

    Source link