Despite all my best intentions I am significantly defined by my occupation. My identity is wrapped up in what I do on a daily basis at work. I am the son of a workaholic and have very early childhood memories of my dad arriving home from work exhausted – he was a technical maintenance manager at the huge Dunlop tyre factory in Birmingham, UK. But despite his tiredness, he would very often quickly eat his dinner, his pager would go off and he would be straight back out of the door to answer some desperately urgent request for help at the plant. I always vowed I would not be like him. In fact, I said as much to a careers adviser at school when I was eighteen whilst preparing for the unwelcome demands of adulthood. My dad was present at that meeting, and it must really have hurt him to hear his first son say those words. In my defence I was young and outspoken and tactless. Not much of a defence, I know.
I am thinking about the relationship between work and education a lot these days. I am currently in Chennai, the largest city in the south of India. (Mumbai is larger but I don’t count it as being in the south. DIscuss.). I am doing some work out here building up the presence of my employer, Oxford Brookes University, by hosting a series of alumni events and holding partnership meetings with other higher education institutions and businesses in three major cities. As a university that sees itself as global it is only fitting that we have chosen strategically to re-energise and integrate more fully our intenational operations regarding student recruitment, partnership and alumni relations. My current Indian tour is only one leg of significant senior level activity in other corners of the world – including China, Malaysia, Singapore, North America, Africa and Northern Europe.
I have now worked in the university sector for over 20 years. Longer than my first (or second?) career in film and television. My university career has consisted of a number of senior level appointments at former polytechnics and at a specialist art and design institution. As such, I am marked by my experiences in both good and bad ways. My first appointments at Bournemouth University were very formative. When I arrived there to work full-time in the mid-1990s I had never received a salary cheque, or more correctly a BACS payment for work in my life. I had only worked freelance as a film and television director, producer and editor. The move to ‘a real job’ was always going to be disruptive in more ways than one.
Every day in Bournemouth I walked past the university’s mission statement, which in a very corporate manner was spelt out on a plaque in the newly constructed atrium. I can’t recall the exact wording but its essence could be distilled to reflect a commitment to vocational education. On reflection, it was an institution in transition. Only recently it had changed its name and status three times in as many years, moving from being an institution of higher education, to a polytechnic, to finally achieving full university status. The period was a time of great change – the higher education gold rush. I recall the haste of some of the decisions taken at that moment. In particular, the rush for student numbers and a resulting first year undergraduate cohort bigger than the size of the rest of the university population. Rightly or wrongly, these were strategic decisions brought about by the political and economic environment the university was operating within.
Back then, to be a university was the ultimate goal. It still is for all manner of educational institutions that I visit around the world. But my time at Bournemouth University also taught me something about the pitfalls of what you lose about your previous identity whilst you are in great haste trying on the new clothes. Wanting to be ‘a pre-eminent vocational institution’ (see, I remember more about that plaque than I cared to let on) wasn’t such a terrible aspiration. However, the newly acquired ceremonial aspects of the university status and the responsibilities of tradition weighed heavily on everyone. To be fair to everyone who worked there at that time, it was also a wonderfully exciting period of my life. Disruptive episodes work like that, don’t they? Myself and my colleagues working within the highly devolved Bournemouth Media School at that time were filled with a desire to be the best at what we did – preparing work-ready graduates for the newly evolving creative industries sector. We were in the right place at the right time.
The university I work at now, Oxford Brookes University, was also a polytechnic and had been for twenty odd years before becoming a university in 1992. I joined the university in 2011 to become a member of their senior management team and lead on the necessary academic restructuring and estates development that would bring the institution up to speed with the competition in the sector. Interestingly, my observations from that time would be that I walked into a place where there was an inner confidence about being a university that I had never experienced at Bournemouth, and the academic portfolio reflected that self-belief. In some ways it shouldn’t have been like that at all. Oxford is home to one of the most pre-eminent academic institutions in the world, marking out the city for some as the intellectual capital of the West. Discuss. Given the context, Oxford Brookes University could have been scurrying about in the shadows of the other university in the city. But, far from it, it had marked itself out as ‘the UK’s best modern university’.
In a world of instant ubiquitous data analytics, the moniker ‘best’ is ironically easy to pin on and just as easy to lose. The UK’s best modern university medal has been self-awarded by at least three other institutions in the past three years, and with good reason. In particular, it has been incredibly personally satisfying to see the progress made by Coventry University in recent times (believe me, as a Brummie those words should be difficult to express). Coventry is now home to an institution with very high levels of student satisfaction and pride and confidence. The senior team there has also seemingly cracked the fundamentals of good partnership work both locally and globally. I have been closely monitoring how they operationalise international student recruitment and believe me they have have a lot to teach the rest of us in the university sector. All of this success is also, importantly, wrapped up in the comfort blanket of good financial performance. I see for the first time they will be posting turnover that has broken through the £300m barrier. Their ultimate challenge though will be to successfully don the robes of serious academic intent over the coming years. Their recent decision to announce a huge financial commitment into their research portfolio is just what you would expect from the new contender. No lack of self-confidence and belief. I admire that.
At Oxford Brookes University – incidentally, the happiest place I have ever worked – we continue our ‘refresh’ at pace. The completion of the £135m multi award-winning John Henry Brookes building in 2014 set the bar for student-centred learning in the UK HE sector. Banish those memories of university atriums built in the 1990s with echoes of international hotel chains. The quality of build I am witnessing in Oxford is breathtaking. The university’s guiding principles are littered with words like ‘bold, ‘confident’, ‘creative’, ‘enterprising’ and so there is a lot to deliver on, but a £150m rolling programme of estate investment is very quickly placing the excellent pedagogic work there in a 21st century housing.
When I talk about Oxford whilst travelling around the world I obviously please my audiences by dwelling on the history of the place. The medieval buildings after all make the perfect backdrop to modern day selfies. But if you are in South-East Asia, the prospective students and their parents want also to hear about that elusive relationship with the world of work, and in a league table driven world their over-riding ambition is to join an ambitious university which can ‘guarantee’ future success in the workplace. We therefore shouldn’t be taken by surprise when everyone’s attention is once again focused on the metrics of vocational excellence. In a moment I am transported back to that day I first idly glanced up at the plaque spelling out the university mission statement.
After tonight’s alumni event at one of Chennai’s most luxurious hotels, I will be flying over to Mumbai on the south-west coast of India, to engage in a similar programme of activity with friends and colleagues. Then we will be moving on to the capital of India, New Delhi. My intention is continue writing this blog every day. Part reflection, part observational documentary.
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