Foundations of Our Success

Our Waterside Campus reflects our ambition. A home-from-home for our students, staff and local communities. Our campus will be full of life, host to a range of learning, social and wellbeing experiences. It will bring people together, enabling our communities to mix while building place and belonging. It will be environmentally sustainable, supporting local ecology and biodiversity.

We will develop a framework to guide development on our campus, (PDF 2MB) ensuring these facilities are prioritised whilst identifying opportunities to enhance our presence locally.

We are a civic institution, with strong roots in our town, our community and our economy. Local businesses and employers are key partners, offering opportunities for our students, and for developing our research and knowledge exchange. We will be a vital participant in local policy developments, partnering with government, business and other anchor institutions to support development in our town and county.

We will listen to our stakeholders and work with them towards shared goals. We know there is appetite for the University to do more to make our work relevant to our local communities. This may include supporting our students to both learn and make a difference through placements or volunteering, supporting local heritage activities, or working with local schools to support more of their students to go to university.

Our community extends beyond our campus. Many of our students live further afield and connect to us as their University even if they only visit occasionally. It also includes students at our partner institutions and our alumni. Our community-building will reflect this, using both place and other forms of connection to create common purpose and shared goals.

Our horizons also extend beyond Northamptonshire and we will serve as a conduit between our locality and the wider world. We will do this through our research and practice, which range from local to global, and crucially the range of our external relationships through which we will continue to learn, exchange knowledge and deploy expertise. Also vital are our partnerships in the UK and other countries, which enrich the diversity of our student body and offer collaborative approaches towards shared goals.

Looking to the future, it will be important that our ways of working are supported by contemporary systems and processes which allow us to focus our attention on the work we most value.

We will continue to focus on this, and our approach will be guided by transparent dialogue across our staff body to develop solutions in partnership.

By 2027, we will conduct a transformation programme for our systems, processes and operating models, including administrative and logistical systems, and the tools that we use for supporting core business such as teaching and research. This will develop the University’s information and technology provision to be a true strategic enabler of our priorities, supporting a forward-looking culture and way of working. It will improve efficiency around basic operations, making them simpler and more reliable, improve staff and students’ day-to-day experience by relieving their time to focus on what they most value, and support better informed decision making. This will ensure that our systems and staffing models are resilient for the future.

We will also review our frameworks for planning and budgeting. This will establish an integrated approach for managing investment and supporting planned resourcing of all areas, especially those which are growing. It will also serve to protect our financial sustainability, integrating this with our other aims as an institution.

We will also improve our capture and use of data to support informed decision-making and governance and our ability to manage our performance and progress towards our goals.

To achieve our ambitions, we need to ensure that we can fund and resource them effectively.

We have modelled the financial dimensions of our goals to 2027. This modelling is at the high level to give us assurance that our objectives are realistic.

It includes strategic initiatives that we wish to undertake and essential investment for key enablers such as IT and our estate. This will support robust financial planning and resource allocation up till our first target year, 2027.

Our objectives are based on the most up-to-date intelligence and data. However, there is a high degree of uncertainty in the higher education sector and its main income streams due to external factors beyond our control. We will continue to adapt to our external environment and any fluctuation in our expected financial position accordingly.