Our University Strategic Plan is a practical guide to help us plan and prioritise our decisions and activity in the years leading to our centenary in 2026. We will use it to deliver on our core purpose: “We act together, using our collective skills and diversity, to deliver a better world through the transformational power of quality education and research.”

It is led by our four core principles, which were developed as a result of extensive consultation with our students, colleagues, alumni, partners and stakeholders. They support us to act as a community engaged with the world around us and to deliver our shared purpose of sustainable excellence in all our activities.

We need to move to a model of distributed leadership so that a broader range of people have the ability to shape the University activities that they know best, and take ownership of the quality of education and research.

The emphasis of the plan is on the way we work, with recurring themes of:

• stronger governance
• more involvement of students and staff at all levels
• working with partners outside the University

Every colleague has a role to play in implementing the strategy. Our decisions and activities must be guided by it, whether we consider them to be business as usual activities or specific programmes and projects designed to bring about change.