A university on the move. But why?
Winds of change are blowing through the university sector. Some are battening down the hatches and hoping for the best, others, like the University of Gloucestershire are on the move.
Dear Readers,
We hope you’ve had a great week.
On Thursday we published a big interview with Greg Pilley, a pioneer in the world of brewing organic beer and the man behind Stroud Brewery. We thought it was fascinating, although we would say that wouldn’t we?
If you have not been to the Thrupp venue we recommend it. Best approached on foot along the canal towpath of the Stroudwater Canal, from either direction. You can read that story here.
Today, in a much shorter read, we hold the University of Gloucestershire’s decision to sell one of its Cheltenham campuses up to the light to see what it might tell us.
Does it say anything about where the university is at? We think it does.
Have a great weekend.
Please send us your stories/ideas about companies/people/issues you think we should write about. Email andrew.merrell@raikesjournal.co.uk or telephone 07956 926061.
Support a key community event - and promote your business
If yours is a business that likes to help community and appreciates a little bit of recognition too, then here’s an opportunity for you. Organisers of Gloucester Goes Retro is looking for a sponsor. The event is a free family day out featuring vintage fashion, retro music festival, hundreds of classic cars that helps create a footfall in the city centre and Docks area in in the region of 25,000. Each of the 500 cars expected to attend is required to display a vehicle pass in their window to identify them as registered. For £1,500 your business name will be on the pass on every single one of those windscreens, and your logo will appear on the Retro supporter’s web page and on social media for the event. Its social media has an estimated 45,000 followers! Best hurry though, the event is due to take place on Saturday 24 August. To find out more email sponsorship@gloucester.gov.uk.
Some briefing notes...
🤔 In November 2023 this reporter was helping spread the word about more Levelling Up cash – another win for Gloucester on the back of the £20 million announced for the University of Gloucestershire and its plans to redevelop the former Debenhams store. But this time the money, £11 million, was for the Greyfriars area. A smaller scheme, but still hugely significant. The city’s culture trust was certainly very excited about it. This was the plans to move the market out of Eastgate Shopping Centre and redevelop the building, the adjacent former bowling green and skeleton of the old Greyfriars Tudor friary itself into a new community space. We’ll be reporting a little more on this on Monday.
😲 We wrote up a story at the start of the week about the plans by Richard Cook of Severn & Wye Smokery to invest £50 million-plus consolidating all his businesses onto one site beside Lydney Harbour. We took the view it would be a thoroughly exciting development in an area which badly needs it, and it was a view informed by the likes of Neill Ricketts, chairman of the Forest Regeneration Partnership, who kindly commented for the article. We also suggested it was a good example of the kind of determination it takes from business people to make good on their plans, We assumed Monday’s Forest District Council meeting was going to bring to a head a long running saga which has already seen the plans challenged, with the council advised by a barrister to throw the challenge out. And then after we published, at the eleventh hour just before the meeting to grant permission, in came another legal challenge the meeting was cancelled! As soon as we know more we’ll let you know.
🏗 Another story we wrote and have not given up on yet is just what is going to happen to Gloucestershire Airport. An agreement was reached for joint owners Gloucester City Council and Cheltenham Borough Council to sell. The airport has been subject to several million pound investments in recent years and is home to a flourishing business community too – which appears to make it something of an asset. Or maybe it makes it the right time to sell, raise some money for the public purse and let the private sector run it. Anyway, as we reported previously that while Cheltenham assumes everything is still going ahead Gloucester City Council is now not confirming anything. We’ve just checked, and it’s sticking to its guns on that one. Or we assume so. There’s not even a ‘no comment’ from the local authority and no word from its leader, Jeremy Hilton either. Very odd.
👏 In more normal business news, Redkite Solicitors’, the firm that was headline sponsor of this year’s incredible Cirencester Business Awards 2024 staged by the town’s chamber of commerce, has appointed two new faces to its employment and HR team, and we wanted to spread the word. (We were media partners for the awards event). James Watkins and William Morse have joined Redkite’s team. Watkins advises clients on a wide variety of contentious and non-contentious matters, including complex internal procedures, employment tribunal claims, and termination of employment issues. The Legal 500 directory names him as a “Rising Star”. Morse advises both employers and employees in relation to all aspects of employment law, including issues around discrimination, TUPE, consultancy, directorship and employment status. He is also an experienced employment tribunal advocate and has developed a niche specialism in the education sector too.
* Everything you read on The Raikes Journal is made possible by our incredible Founding Partners: QuoLux, Willans LLP, Gloucestershire College, Merrell People and Randall & Payne, our sponsors Hartpury University and Hartpury College, our Founding Members and wonderful paying subscribers.
If you upgrade to paid, you’ll be part of this community interest company too. In an era when local journalism is all but gone, we are dedicated to delivering quality journalism for Gloucestershire, to championing the county, in particular its businesses, charities, education and training providers, to defending it, challenging those who need to be held to account and to helping create an even stronger community. If you upgrade to paid you will be able to see past the paywalls on our second and third email editions of the week, that lock all our archive after two weeks and lock our rolling Top 100 Businesses in Gloucestershire, the series that follows the financial fortunes of our biggest firms by turnover. You will be able to comment on our stories too. You’ll be helping make this CIC sustainable. Please do join us.
You can sign up for just £2.30 a week - or £1.80 a week if two or more people sign up at once.
A university on the move. But why?
We don’t tend to think of universities as subject to market forces like other businesses, but all the signs are there. Some have battened down the hatches, others, like the University of Gloucestershire, are proving to be fleet of foot.
By Andrew Merrell
This week saw a dramatic announcement from the University of Gloucestershire, with the agent hired to market one of its Cheltenham campuses taking to social media to tell everyone it was up for sale.
When you see the pictures of Hardwick Campus it does look rather tired, and the story goes that it would take too much investment to bring it up to the kind of standard the university would like for its students.
So it’s been working with Gloucester-based Quattro Design Architects and Bristol-based Black Box Planning to draw up a proposal for 69 homes on the land and Ash & Co has begun the marketing of the 4.69-acre site.
Apparently Cheltenham Borough Council, which will has the ultimate say on whether any such project goes ahead, is on board so far and it looks like all systems go.
But is it about more than off-loading a site that will only cause it further headaches when it’s already got a major building project underway in Gloucester, repurposing the former Debenhams store into a city centre campus?
It was only in 2023 that it was going through planning with a view to doing more work on the Hardwick buildings in St Paul’s Road. The last major investment in the property coming to a head in 2011 and costing £5.3 million.
UK students fees are currently fixed at £9,250 a year per student and at some universities the costs of courses is falling short of teaching costs, with other financial pressures are also coming to bear heavily too.
Some institutions are investing heavily in accommodation to bolster their income, and there is a definite sense that those who do no more than tinker with their business models could hit trouble.
In January Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, told Research Professional News, that while many providers were well prepared to weather the storm - the ones taking action and adapting - some institutions could face difficulties.
“There is clearly a real risk that a university could become insolvent in 2024 because of a mix of factors—including the underfunding of home students, slackening demand and higher interest rates, not to mention the tense geopolitical situation,” said Hillman.
Meanwhile, UCAS is predicting more students than ever are on their way. The market is there - the business model isn’t quite.
Rather than just take some stuff off social media and run it as an article we actually spoke to the University of Gloucestershire and asked what the sale was all about.
Dr Matthew Andrews, chief operating officer and pro vice-chancellor student experience at the university, said: “The sale of our Hardwick Campus reflects the university’s ambitions to create vibrant campuses that offer excellent teaching facilities, are environmentally and financially sustainable, and provide increased opportunities for connections through the co-location of courses.
“The Hardwick Campus currently houses our fine arts and photography courses, which will move to Park Campus in Cheltenham as part of our ‘creative campus’ initiative.
“This decision offers us the opportunity to bring together more of our courses in the School of Creative Arts, strengthening the school’s identity, and allowing us to enhance our student offer.
“Together with the exciting new plans to deliver cyber and technical and creative computing facilities at Park, funded by an Office for Students (OfS) grant.
“Park Campus will be transformed into a vibrant space for creatives and digital.”
It’s a measure of how quickly the university is moving its feet that a glance at its Strategic Plan for 2017-2022 doesn’t mention any such sale, and neither does its subsequent plan for 2022-2027.
The refurbishment work outlined by Dr Andrews above was originally announced as a plan to build a new state of the art cyber and digital skills centre for students studying traditional degrees, (BSc/MSc/MEng), higher apprenticeships, professional short courses, digital skills bootcamps, and new higher technical qualifications, due for completion in Spring 2025.
In August 2023 architects Austin-Smith:Lord, which has offices in Cardiff and Bristol, was selected to enable the University of Gloucestershire’s vision for the new cyber centre.
That messaging changed in March 2023, with the scheme was no longer about ‘building’ but refurbishing, refitting and partnerships. The university was now working with DP Designs.
And the vision had changed to a Cyber Control Centre, a Virtual Reality facility, a digital lounge, enhanced teaching and learning facilities and spaces designed to support collaboration with businesses.
That’s not take anything away from how exciting the new iteration of the project sounded. Just that the situation was dynamic - the willingness to ‘pivot’ and lose none of the ambition was there for all to see.
There was change elsewhere too reflecting just who it was trying to please and who it was taking feedback from. The university also announced it had agreed a strategic partnership with CyNam, the Cheltenham-based cyber-focused networking group, Hub8 and Plexal.
CyNam is described as a thriving community of more than 5,000 members from the sector, among them names from some of the biggest businesses in cyber and digital anywhere in the world - plus a strong bond with a certain GCHQ.
And the university was underlining its commitment to work with Cheltenham Borough Council and other partners “to maximise the opportunities offered by the Golden Valley development and the region’s strategic emphasis on cyber and security for the future”.
It’s suddenly all starting to look very much like a university thinking on its feet, resetting for a new era.
Claire Marchant, formerly headed-up another Cheltenham institution, UCAS, took the reigns of the university at the start of the 2023/24 academic year when Stephen Marston retired after 12 years in the role.
When Raikes was at a business event in July, the university’s professor of gender and leadership, Dr Cathia Jenainati, revealed how the School of Creative Arts and the cyber and digital school would be coming under one roof on Park Campus, explaining how the days of keeping students strictly within their disciplines was old-school thinking.
Students, we were told, wanted a broader range of skills and knowledge relevant to the real world - an ability to understand issues around sustainability, for example, gender, HR and legal knowledge too - skills which would give them greater value to prospective employers.
This would all be made easier, she said, by bringing a number of subjects under one roof to deliver the depth and breadth. But she also implied the merger onto one site was partly due to circumstance. Creative thinking in difficult times delivering opportunity?
It was a pitch well received by the business audience that is becoming increasingly dependent on the university to help it deliver the kinds of skills it needs.
On August 5 Dr Jenainati was on LinkedIn helping to promote the opening o the aforementioned new-look school of Cyber Security, Computing, and Computer Games Design and Programming, described now as “a multimillion pound refurbishment project”.
In its last annual report, for the year ending 31 July 2023 and published in December of last year, the university was already talking about how it was taking hard look at its courses.
It was, it said, “continuing to reshape and rationalise” its academic portfolio “increasing its focus on courses with clear professional career outcomes, including computing, health and business”.
In other words, ditching the course what made no commercial sense, focusing on those that did, and forging those partnerships that will help make its all-important goal – helping its students gain valuable work experience and jobs – all the more possible. Everything you would expect it to do - while demonstrating how open to change it needs to be.
The annual report showed a deficit for the second year running of £2 million - down from £7.7 million in 2022. Its long-term borrowing stood at £30 million after refinancing, mainly to help with the refurbishment of the former Debenham’s building, up from £22.9 million in 2022. Total income was £88.2 million, up from £80.9 the year previously.
“Despite the continued and increasing challenging external operating environment for the university and higher education sector generally regarding capped tuition fees and cost of living crisis, the income position for the university has seen growth of eight per cent,” said the report.