Our Vision
Our Vision
UWE is a different type of university – it’s not an 'ivory tower', it is directly involved with both communities and businesses in Bristol and the West of England. It provides ongoing training for professionals in sectors including education, law, business, engineering, the built environment, healthcare and media. Half of its students come from within a 40 mile radius of Bristol. It also has a growing international reputation for research, having recently doubled its research funding in the recent Research Assessment Exercise.
Education, innovation and enterprise are key to the competitiveness and success of Bristol and the South West, and through its strong vocational focus UWE Bristol already makes an important contribution to these strengths of the region. But it wants to do more.
To build on its existing strengths as an enterprising university, and to secure its future in the increasingly competitive world of higher education, it needs to have a first class campus and facilities – both to attract top quality students and staff from across the world.
It wants to support local and regional businesses by providing much needed conference rooms, premises and space and play a stronger role in the community by providing other facilities which local people can use and enjoy.
UWE Bristol took an important step towards achieving this vision of a university fit for the 21st Century last October, when it bought a large piece of land next to its existing main campus at Frenchay.
This gives it the opportunity to move existing facilities from St Matthias and Glenside to Frenchay, at the same time as rethinking the layout of the existing campus and providing some new and improved facilities, which will transform the way the University operates.
The purpose of the New Campus Project is to create a campus which meets the needs and expectations of the wide range of people who the University serves – whether they be, for example, full time undergraduates living on campus, part time students undertaking professional development courses, businesses using University facilities or partners from the public and private sector collaborating with UWE staff and students on research projects.
As well as improving the campus layout and providing new buildings and infrastructure, the New Campus Project will look at how to use advances in technology to support learning both on and off campus.
It will take the best new developments at the University – such as the student village, the architecture studio and the education building – as its starting point.
The New Campus Project will contribute to UWE Bristol’s ambition to be a modern university – an environmentally friendly, sustainable and healthy place to live, work, learn and socialise. This will mean identifying ways to cut energy consumption, increase recycling and encouraging people on campus to take more exercise, and providing an attractive campus environment that supports the student and staff experience and allows us to use the most up to date techniques, approaches and equipment.
None of this will happen overnight, and it will need to go through the full planning process. These are long-term goals to transform the University, which may take up to 25 years to deliver in full.
It will need to be done in the most cost effective manner and allow for flexibility in an uncertain future to meet the changing needs of the region.
This will mean coming up with a plan which generates funds from private sector partnerships, through letting space and facilities and through training and research, to invest in further improvements to the University.
The University has now started to plan how the new campus might work and it needs the insight of its staff, students, business and community partners and neighbours to ensure the plans reflect the needs of people using the campus.
You can get involved in lots of different ways. From now through to the autumn, the University will be gradually working up its thoughts on the layout of the site, community facilities, landscape and buildings design and the infrastructure, such as routes into and through the campus.
There will be plenty of opportunities to have your say on these as they develop.
