Our Purpose

Social impact is our ultimate purpose

• We create social impact through the transformative experience of our students. Our research, enterprise and engagement with the wider world, and our diverse collaborations and partnerships will continue to transform lives, communities and businesses for the better.
• Social impact will always be a key feature of our education, and our students and our staff will be socially conscious changemakers, engaged in global challenges and confident of their role in making positive contributions to addressing them.
• We will refine our thinking around the complex processes which make our social impact happen and how we evaluate it. We will have a clear story around social impact and the pathways that create it through our student experience, learning, teaching and research.
• Relationships and external engagement are fundamental in creating social impact. We will be clear around what our external relationships mean to us, allowing us to further develop collaboration with our local communities, business and government, and deploy our expertise to shape policy and development in our town and county. Our social impact will reach beyond Northampton to the national and international canvas both through our own activities and through our partnerships.
• We will evidence the social impact of our education through evaluating our students’ confidence in entering the job market, and the social impact of our research through our participation in impact assessments in the Research Excellence Framework. We will also work with our academic experts at the University to develop appropriate and meaningful ways of measuring our social impact.