Our future, together.
Our path to 2035
We co-create and share new knowledge, to deliver a better world for future generations.
We do this by:
- Offering an excellent educational experience for students of all backgrounds and experiences, and a commitment to flexible lifelong learning that creates positive change.
- Generating new knowledge that tackles the big challenges, co-creating solutions with global and local communities.
- Acting as an anchor institution in our city-region, delivering cultural, social, economic and environmental benefit for Cardiff, Wales and the world.
Introduction
Through our collaborative and consultative exercise – Y Sgwrs Fawr–The Big Conversation – we have co-created our vision for the future of Cardiff University. Building on our history, values, strengths, resources and networks, and drawing on our academic and professional expertise, we have developed our direction of travel, together.
This strategy charts our course to 2035.
Where we are starting from
Universities are facing an existential moment. The current model is no longer fit for purpose. Across the world, institutions like ours are wrestling with changing expectations, less real income, new competitors, demographic change, and legacy cultures and systems.
Rather than let change happen to us, our community has been proactive in considering what type of university we want to be, for what type of future, and agreeing how we make that happen. We are clear about our responsibilities to our communities and to future generations.
We understand that we are facing a decade of rapid change. We will need to grapple with, and work to prevent, climate change and decreasing biodiversity, and navigate the impact that shifting geo-political relations will have on new and existing partnerships.
New technologies will shape the way we interact with each other, how we learn and how we teach, and the work that we do. We are facing the future with optimism and seeking opportunity from the challenges.
Remembering where we came from
Our future direction has been heavily shaped by our past. We were the first Welsh university to admit women, the earliest chartered institution in the UK to employ women as professors.
We stood alongside our neighbours in the city over generations, in Wales and beyond, providing a warm Welsh welcome to those displaced by war or needing sanctuary.
Student volunteerism and activism is a rich archival theme, demonstrating our tradition of enabling free speech and debate, and encouraging civic participation and action. This strategy embodies our commitment to delivering a better world for future generations, a new manifestation of our progressive history.
Our vision
By 2035, we want to be:
- Recognised globally as a pioneer for research and innovation, built on our strength-in-places, initially through translational excellence in creative industries and advanced manufacturing (compound semiconductors).
- Attractive to students of all ages and backgrounds, learning in a variety of ways, taught using the best pedagogy, enabled by flexible delivery and digital innovation.
- The university of choice for regional, national and global alumni, partners and funders looking for bold and brave approaches to the future.
- A valued and active anchor partner in our city-region, driving significant progress on the Cardiff Capital Region Investment Zone and Academic Health Sciences Precinct.
- An employer and educator of choice, with a vibrant, international staff and student body that is also representative of our diverse city-region.
We will have:
- Helped to solve grand challenges in areas such as climate change, biodiversity, health, security, sustainability and social justice.
- Diversified our income, achieving financial sustainability with more commercial revenue from our research and our estate, diverse sources of research and teaching income, and growth in philanthropy.
- Made a significant economic and social impact on Cardiff and Wales.
- Established a network of well-developed, reciprocal, transnational education partnerships across the globe.
- Developed a smaller, high quality, civic campus, that is green, creative and open, cohabiting and colocating with communities and partners.
Our strategic priorities
We will build on our history, values and strengths, to co-create the future through our culture, our place, and the impact of our research and education. We will become a great global civic university, grounded in our people, our city-region, and open to the world.
Priority 1: Culture, cynefin and community
Our university will be an amazing place to research, teach, learn, study and create, which allows excellence to flourish beyond boundaries, enabling curiosity and ambition.
We will support all members of our community to thrive. We will welcome and accept people for who they are - a community where we know and value each other and understand what matters to us.
We value diversity and will take the necessary steps to be a genuinely inclusive, positively bilingual and anti-racist university. ‘Cynefin’ is a touchstone for us, a place where people feel they belong. We will work together, leaving no-one behind, clear on our expectations of each other and pursuing shared priorities.
Our values and work will align in a socially responsible university that strives to make Cardiff and Wales, as well as the world beyond, a better place. Our actions and behaviours will engender trust and respect from others, and will inspire students and staff to be lifelong champions. Our strong disposition is to make a difference and to be among the very best.
Priority 2: A vibrant and thriving place
We are a capital city university; an anchor institution for Cardiff and Wales, embodying Welshness, embracing the Welsh language, proud of our heritage. We celebrate being multicultural and multilingual, drawing together the best minds from across the globe and nurturing homegrown talent.
We are an integral part of a liveable, creative, bilingual, multicultural city and will work with others to ensure Cardiff is a wonderful city to visit and to work, study and live. We will be open to our partners – locally, nationally, globally - and accessible with a clearly marked ‘front door’ that says ‘croeso’.
We will be more visible and present in diverse communities, allowing knowledge to flow in both directions, sharing our spaces and resources. We will be distinctively of Cardiff and Wales in all that we do, through our outlook, teams, investments, facilities, partnerships, collaborations and ecosystems. We will connect Cardiff and Wales to the world through mutually beneficial connections and global relationships that benefit us all.
We will foster social mobility and economic impact, creating a highly skilled workforce and building on joint research and innovation priorities. We will encourage entrepreneurship among our staff, students and alumni, generating spinouts and commercialising our research to create new businesses and jobs. Cardiff staff, students and alumni will be global ambassadors for a Welsh spirit of change-making which is deeply rooted in place and community.
We will improve our campuses, their sustainability, and the shared experience of being here. That means taking seriously the challenge of climate change and decreasing biodiversity, tackling our carbon footprint, enhancing our green infrastructure, and adapting our buildings to enable us to work better together. We will invest in world class approaches – physical and digital – for research and innovation, education, and operations.
Priority 3: Co-creating futures
We will work collaboratively as we co-create futures with our staff, students, alumni and partners. We will be agile, innovative and continually evolving. Together, we will adapt to a changeable world and deal with uncertainty.
We will take a global outlook and work to establish international partnerships that are genuinely reciprocal. We will embrace, prepare for and actively shape the future throughout our activities. We will be united by a mission to reshape, rewire and renew prospects not just for tomorrow, but far beyond.
Our intellectual curiosity and research intensity will create a depth of understanding from which we will innovate; sustaining and securing the future, enriching lives, supporting social integrity, pioneering public values, embedding one-health, enabling physical and mental well-being, driving decarbonisation and developing new transformational technologies.
We will be world-renowned for our impact and underpinning research strengths, working with others to create insights and solutions far beyond those that can be achieved alone.
We will offer flexible, tailored, lifelong learning to our students that gives them choices, agency and a voice, and provide future-proofed knowledge and skills that they can apply in the real world to fulfil their aspirations. We will teach our students in a way that develops them further into resilient, critical, problem-solving change makers who know how to work together in an uncertain, interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral, digitised world.
We will help people from all backgrounds transform their lives, place, and society and will have a lifelong commitment to, and relationship with, our students and alumni.
How will we get there?
We are following 4 approaches to take us to our future:
Delivering efficiently
We will have a strong emphasis on prioritisation, implementation and clarity. We will streamline governance processes, reduce workload, bureaucracy and duplication, and focus on outcomes. We will be transparent about the decisions we make and the reasons we make them.
We will do things once, in the right place, by the right people, at the right time. Our aim is a seamless, personalised, simple experience for students and staff.
We will use data, intelligence and automation, and sector leading digital practices for both operational delivery, and student and staff experience.
Examples of the actions we will take include:
- taking a whole-of-University organisational approach that simplifies functions, roles and responsibilities
- digitising and automating within key professional services, including research and education
- introducing a new approach to student success (data-led, personalised, professionalised)
- delivering estates rationalisation, commercialisation and decarbonisation, working with our city partners
Working collaboratively
We will have an interdisciplinary and cross institutional ethos and be more porous and partnering in all activities. We will break down internal and external siloes. We will co-locate disciplines, academics and professional services, with new shared ways of working, including with our partners and diverse communities. Staff and students will co-design the future student experience.
Our approach to leadership will be participatory and collective, and we will use our university as a ‘living lab’ to co-define our challenges and work together on solutions.
Examples of the actions we will take include:
- incentivising interdisciplinarity in our research, innovation and education
- working with external partners and alumni to enhance commercialisation, translational research, entrepreneurship and civic engagement
- developing a whole-of-university Graduate School and aligned interdisciplinary postgraduate teaching and research programmes
- working with students, alumni and partners to improve the 360° student experience (including transitions, wellbeing, inclusion and accommodation)
- adopting a ‘place-making’ approach to our future spaces and campuses
Empowering staff and students
We will empower our staff and students, building a shared culture of trust, transparency and accountability. We will protect and champion academic freedom. We will always seek to continuously improve our activities. We will celebrate our achievements and successes, and be clear about our expectations for performance, attitudes and behaviours. We will be proactive about creating community and celebrate diversity. We will be a great place to gain an education and build a career.
Examples of the actions that we will take include:
- new approaches to recruitment, retention, performance and promotion that diversify our university and support our strategic aspirations, attracting the very best staff and students to realise their ambitions with us.
- developing opportunities for staff and students to move across institutions and sectors, making our university more porous, and our staff and students more connected.
- working with the Students’ Union to more fully engage our increasingly diverse student community
- pursuing and promoting Charter Mark work programmes and action plans.
Being ambitious
We are a confident organisation that wants to be the very best. We strive for quality and want to rank with the world’s leading universities. We will be clear about our research and education strengths, and actively partner with our city region, the rest of Wales, GW4 and institutions right across the globe to complement these.
We will develop a sustainable business model that means we generate surpluses to reinvest in core activity, and seek diversified sources of income, embracing future funding models and philanthropy, and responding to changing student demographics.
Examples of the action we will take include:
- developing the next generation of positively disruptive research and innovation centres, with pathways to support growth and inclusion, to accelerate deep collaborations and partnerships broadly driven by:
- One Health
- Social and cultural innovation
- Sustainability and technological transformation
- developing and teaching a distinctive ‘change makers’ curriculum, underpinned by future-focused delivery modes and pedagogies, that sees more students in internships, placements, work experience and skill-share in employers and communities
- creating a portfolio of new educational offerings including flexible, modularised, lifelong learning and high quality, reciprocal, transnational education initiatives
- fostering new systems for entrepreneurship among our staff, students and alumni, encouraging spinouts and commercialising our research, generating new businesses and jobs.
- establishing a Futures initiative and associated Early Career Fellowship Programme that position our university as a key site for the creation of more just, sustainable and inclusive futures.
Delivery
Delivery of this strategy will take place across three interrelated time horizons.
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Horizon one
Will largely focus on our ways of working, organisational effectiveness and the creation of financial headroom, putting in place the fundamentals that will enable change.
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Horizon two
Will incorporate activity that begins to deliver growth and innovation in the areas that speak to our vision for the future, allowing us to build momentum for change.
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Horizon three
Will take our reinvention further, incorporating activities that we might not yet be able to specify but that will emerge as we work together to cocreate our future.
We outline the activities that will deliver the Strategy in the Transformation Roadmap, providing more detail of each of the Horizons. The Transformation Roadmap will be organised into discrete workstreams, and the University Executive Board will have oversight of the whole Transformation Programme.
