I began this role in September 2017 and was immediately struck by both the differences and similarities between Queen Mary and other Russell Group universities. Queen Mary has world-leading research across wide-ranging disciplines, but we should be much more ambitious about highlighting them. The University also has extraordinary student demographics. More than 90% of our home students come from state schools, with 40% of our home students being the first in their family to go to university. In addition, there are over 160 nationalities represented on the University’s London campuses. Queen Mary’s student population is a wonderfully diverse mix, where people who grew up around the corner exchange ideas in corridors with those from the other side of the world. Our students need to be nurtured and developed. Student support in all its forms is critical for all students, but particularly for those who are a long way from home, have overcome significant obstacles to get to university or have many other competing priorities in their lives, such as caring responsibilities. There are also the joys – and challenges – of educating a diverse group of students. It is surely more rewarding than teaching a more uniform group but it requires different techniques, and an ongoing commitment to the development of excellent education and student support by the University.

Never has it been more true that the only constant, for the higher education sector, is change. It is impossible to predict what will happen over the course of the next few years in the sector, or to accurately predict the labour market for which we are preparing our students. Looking beyond higher education we also do not know whether the current economic and political turmoil in countries across the globe, including our own, will spiral or settle. We do know, however, that students preparing for university are evermore savvy and socially conscious. They understand the importance of a well-rounded education, lifelong learning, adaptability and personal resilience. As a society, we are continuing to battle the ingrained issues of the economic divide, to ensure that everyone has the chance to fulfil their potential, irrespective of their background.

I am confident this strategy will deliver: for Queen Mary, for its communities, and for society. It is a bold strategy, which builds on the University’s strengths – its fabulous communities. It is built on firm foundations and a continual commitment to excellence, to furrowing the University’s own path, and to financial sustainability. I commend to you Queen Mary’s Strategy 2019 – 2030.

The vision of our founders, for each institution, was to provide ‘hope and opportunity’ for the less privileged population in East London and the suburbs of the City of London. These four, historic institutions now make up Queen Mary University of London, a global University committed to improving lives locally, nationally and internationally.

Today, Queen Mary is unique. True to our founders’ vision, we continue to open the doors of opportunity by seamlessly combining world-leading strengths in both education and research. We have an impressive and well-deserved reputation for attracting national and international students from all backgrounds, whilst retaining a deep and enduring engagement with our local community. Our potential to address some of society’s long-standing, and frustrating, issues with social mobility is unrivalled. We offer a Russell Group research-led education and attract local, national and international students from diverse backgrounds, actively seeking out and recruiting students from backgrounds currently under-represented at universities like ours.

Our strategy is based on our two main core areas of activity: education and the student experience, and research and innovation. Global and public engagement, shaping policy, economic and societal impact, entrepreneurship and developing partnerships are embedded in all our activities.

Our students deserve an outstanding education, coupled with tailored personal support. At Queen Mary, we co-create our pedagogical approach with our students to deliver a gold-standard education. Our wrap-around student support ensures our students are able to fulfil their potential and get the most from their studies and experiences. See ‘Education and Student Experience’ for more about this part of our strategy.

We have research strengths across wide-ranging disciplines: true, world-leading highlights. Areas such as Law, Medicine, Dentistry, Linguistics, English, History, Drama, Engineering and Life Sciences are nationally and internationally leading. The quality of our research speaks for itself. Through this strategy we will significantly build the quantity and capacity of our research, whilst maintaining our world-leading quality, through supporting our scholars at all stages of their careers. Through the creation of interdisciplinary University Research Institutes, Centres and Networks, we will build opportunities for scholars from different disciplines to work together to address the major challenges facing society. Our University Institutes will be vibrant hubs, both physical and virtual, in areas that align with our strengths and societal challenges including Global Health and Inequalities, Digital Environment, Ethics and Governance and Creative Industries. These will be underpinned by world-leading University Centres of Excellence and University Networks. All University Institutes, Centres and Networks will be continually reviewed and refreshed to ensure that they align with our core strengths and allow new and focused areas to develop in a creative and responsive way. See ‘Research and Innovation’ for more about this part of our strategy.

There is no doubt we are living in interesting times. The turbulence in the national and international sector, and in politics and economies, across the world, is unprecedented. Personally, I doubt this will settle down. Our contribution as a university will always remain the same, irrespective of external pressures. We will remain true to our vision of opening the doors of opportunity through our education and research. We will continue to expand the boundaries of knowledge through our research, to help tackle inequalities and other global challenges facing society. We will also build on our success of attracting students from traditionally under-represented groups and ensure we serve them well.

We will prepare our graduates to take their place in an ever-changing world as the next generation of leaders in their chosen fields.

We are already a global university, with footprints in Paris, Malta, Athens and Singapore, and significant transnational education in China. Our staff collaborate all over the world, and the impact of our research is felt across the world. We have a strong sense of place in East London, which is combined with a global outlook and a full understanding that we must prepare our students to be global citizens. Over the course of this strategy we will further develop the global Queen Mary family and footprint. We will continue to build strategic partnerships with the very best universities and businesses overseas, further developing global policy relationships and expand and bring greater coherence to our physical and virtual international footprint. We will ensure our alumni retain a close connection with their University throughout their lives, and enable them to be our advocates and ambassadors as well as giving them the opportunity to contribute to the future development of Queen Mary.

The heart of this strategy is the Queen Mary community: our students, staff and alumni. We will support, develop and nurture our people so that they can be the best they can be. We want our staff and students to be entrepreneurial, and we will support them to realise their ambitions and dreams. We will embrace a culture of creativity and innovation and support our staff and students to take risks, within a managed framework. We will build resilience with our communities to understand that sometimes ideas and projects will fail, and it is how we deal with and move on from failure that sets us apart.

We are incredibly proud of, and cherish, the diversity and quality of our student and our staff communities. We know from experience that diversity is a potent catalyst for ground-breaking ideas: in conversations in corridors snatched between lectures; when science and the humanities work together; and between students who grew up round the corner and those from the other side of the world. We will continue to embrace and enhance this diversity of thought and opinion in everything we do in the firm belief that when different views collide, disciplines interact, and perspectives intersect, truly original thought takes place.

The potential and adaptability of Queen Mary students is unnerving. We attract some of the brightest and best students from across the world and from all walks of life. Our students themselves do not always realise just how far they can go and how high they can aim. All our students bring their own unique premium of talent to get into Queen Mary. We will ensure that premium is embellished at our University and translated into greater attainment and opportunities.

In some cases, our students do not have the networks and in-built confidence to enable them to aspire to the careers they deserve. In addition, they do not always have the support they need to manage the many conflicting demands of their lives whilst at university. It is our responsibility to provide that support, tailored to each and every student, to ensure that they can reach their full potential. To realise this ambition this core area of our strategy is delivered through our education and student experience principles, supported by four pillars of excellence outlined below.

The education and student experience principles informing this strategy are to:

• Be the most inclusive and diverse Russell Group University and ensure that anyone who is able to flourish at Queen Mary can join us, irrespective of their background. We will actively seek out and recruit students from backgrounds currently under-represented at universities like ours, and will further develop, significantly enhance and champion the international diversity within our UK campuses.
  
  
• Raise the profile of Queen Mary, so that any student who might wish to apply is fully aware of the University’s strengths and unique offering. We will offer support to all our students so they can successfully transition to our University.
  
  
• Ensure everyone who has the potential is able to access a Queen Mary education without necessarily coming to London. This will include significantly increasing our community of transnational students and increasing the number of partners with whom we deliver such education. It will also include significant investment in postgraduate online learning and part-time opportunities. We will continue to broaden our portfolio of short courses including continuing professional development and executive education, enabling students to move seamlessly between different delivery options.
  
  
• Ensure that the holistic education and learning experience we provide is world-leading, co-created with students and employers, as appropriate, and reflects our diverse and international community. To deliver our cutting edge curricula, we will develop, implement and promote new pedagogical approaches using the latest, or our own bespoke, technological advances to enhance the student experience.
  
  
• Ensure that our community of undergraduate, postgraduate and international students creates a vibrant and cohesive education environment, consistent with a world-leading university.

Our four pillars of education and student experience excellence that inform this strategy are:

• Excellence in education.
• Excellence in student engagement.
• Excellence in student employability.
• Excellence in the learning environment.

The four pillars of excellence are presented below:

Leading research to cure haemophilia; a revolutionary new political theory; the latest advances to underpin the treatment of cancer and heart disease; pioneering developments in artificial intelligence; an acclaimed biography
of one of the 20th century’s greatest leaders. These are just some of the many recent outputs of research at Queen Mary. The quality of our research and impact is recognised all over the world. We will build upon our success, specifically by significantly increasing capacity in key focused areas and bringing research excellence together with real impact at all times. In keeping with our ethos, we attract scholars from all over the world and will create more opportunities for them to work together and make sure we are supporting and nurturing them at all stages of their careers.

Entrepreneurship, innovation and engagement are an embedded part of our research culture. We will maintain our commitment to achieving impact and involving end users, patients, policy-makers and the public in the research we do. This core area of our strategy is delivered through our research and innovation principles supported by three pillars of excellence shown below.

• Attract the best researchers from all over the world, and develop our staff and research students to become world-leaders in disciplinary and interdisciplinary research and innovation.
  
  
• Significantly increase external research funding to support our research activities from multiple national and international sources. Our internal funding will be used to stimulate new activity in priority areas of research, used to leverage external funding, and to focus on defined areas of excellence and interdisciplinary research.
  
  
• Provide a world-class virtual and physical research infrastructure, available to all researchers, supported
  by internal and significant external funding. Our professional research support staff will be effective,
  efficient and agile in providing support through the full life-cycle of all our research projects.
  
  
• Produce world-leading research outputs as assessed by our peers, with a clear and disciplined focus on global and local economic and societal impact. We will ensure that our research is accessible by adherence to recognised open science principles.
  
  
• Regularly assess how we support, review and undertake research to foster diversity and inclusion and ensure that our research practice is of the highest quality in terms of research ethics and integrity.

Our three pillars of research excellence that inform this strategy are:

• Providing world-class support for our researchers.
  
  
• Creating a world-class research environment, focused on our strengths, which enables staff and students to flourish.
  
  
• Producing world-leading research outputs and ensuring that research development, innovation, enterprise and social impact are embedded in all our research activities.

The three pillars of excellence are presented below:

Enabling Plans

This strategy will be supported by detailed enabling plans, which will be regularly updated, covering:

• Education and the Student Experience.
• Research and Innovation.
• Policy, Impact and Public Engagement.
• Global Engagement.
• Infrastructure (Estates, Equipment and IT).
• Our Faculties
• Professional Services.
• People and Culture.

Measuring Progress

We will measure our progress via Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) under the following headings:

• People: the lifeblood of this Strategy. We will measure progress with staff engagement, satisfaction, and increasing diversity across our communities.
  
  
• Education: one of our two core pillars. We will seek to improve, and measure, equality of attainment, retention, and graduate outcomes.
  
  
• Research: the other core pillar. We will seek to improve, and monitor, indicators of quality and volume of research.

We will also monitor these enablers of our Strategy:

• Student recruitment: including our ability to recruit students from currently under-represented groups.
  
  
• Resources: our ability to invest in people, infrastructure and systems.
  
  
• Reputation: to ensure the world’s perception of Queen Mary is at least equal to our quality.

Financial sustainability

We will ensure that we remain financially sustainable in all that we do.

Given the challenging turbulent funding landscape we must ensure that our University’s finances are carefully managed and that our appetite for risk is appropriate to the environment in which we are working. We must continue to invest in the development of our staff and our infrastructure.

As a campus university in London, we have a costly estate and a need to invest in our physical and digital infrastructure to keep pace with and where possible outstrip the expectations of our students and scholars. These investments are carefully planned out over the next 10 years. This will include the development of new buildings, refurbishment and significant maintenance on each of our five London campuses, investment in IT infrastructure, investment in equipment, and investment and expansion of our residential footprint.

We are committed to working with alumni and friends of Queen Mary to help us achieve our ambitions and diversify our income streams. We will expand the use of our estate and make sure our facilities are fully utilised and our campuses vibrant in the evenings and at weekends. Where possible, we will ensure that our campuses and facilities are open to and used by the public. We will also find further efficiencies in the way we run our University, ensure our administration is lean and agile, and make best use of cutting-edge technology to underpin all the work of the University.

Our finances are overseen by our Finance and Investment Sub Committee, which reports to our Executive and to our Council Committees.

A PDF of the Queen Mary University of London Strategy 2030 document is available to download below:

Queen Mary University of London Strategy 2030 document [PDF 17,616KB]