Read: Capital gains – and global impact

The University of Greenwich’s purposeful approach is helping students to access opportunities in the heart of London’s economy; while also unlocking talent that is having a positive impact across the globe, including within international development. Here Vice-Chancellor Jane Harrington talks social mobility with us.

Tell us about your vision for the university - and the role it plays in driving social mobility.

Greenwich has really genuine roots in social inclusion, which I think is really important.We’re located in Greenwich, but also in Avery Hill, in London, and in Medway in Kent. This gives us huge opportunities for really developing a fantastic modern University. I’m refreshing the strategy [at the time of writing], but we're talking about being the best modern university in the UK. 

I don't want us to try to mirror somewhere like Oxbridge, that's not what we're about. What we do need to be able to do is to shout about what we are and why that's so important to the country. So, our purpose as educators is to be a positive force for change, building knowledge, creating opportunities and changing lives for the better. 

If you put that in context, 49 per cent of our students are from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds.  A huge proportion are the first in their family to go to university, and over 70 per cent of them are commuter students, living at home and coming to the university every day. It's a very diverse community and that brings with it these huge opportunities to mobilise that community and really shout about what we stand for. It's very much focused on professional and technical education, and giving people life chances that they wouldn't have had without that education.

Is it really important that local communities in Greenwich and Medway really understand the role the university can play in unlocking potential and giving back to the community?

Absolutely. I've started some work with all of the higher education and further education, colleges and universities in the region alongside the local council and the chambers of commerce, to look at what businesses need in terms of rescaling and upskilling in the current climate.  For me, it's all about partnerships, because universities I don't think can or should sit in isolation in their region. They're very much a part of the economy, as big employers in their own right. But beyond that, what we can bring as a university, and what the region can give the university, works both ways. Therefore, I'm very keen to partner with local councils and local businesses and also, really importantly, the local schools and the local further education [FE] colleges and start to create pathways through education. It doesn't bother me if a student starts on a part-time course in an FE college, and ultimately ends up in higher education, or they start in the university, either route is fine. But we need to have those pathways and stop seeing it as competition and actually recognise that we’re much stronger if we're all working together. If we're actually serving the region with what they need, what the business community needs and what the public sector needs, that can only be a good thing.

Universities can make a huge difference in terms of driving social mobility. Tell us a little bit about your aspirations for the work that you’re doing on this front, as a signatory of the Social Mobility Pledge.

Social mobility is really important. If you go back to the roots of University of Greenwich, it was about social inclusion. But I do think that for many universities this was taken for granted for a while. For me, it's about putting that at the forefront of what we do. I think it makes it much clearer to everybody, not just inside, but outside, of what we actually stand for.

For me, it's about social mobility in its broadest sense in terms of age, abilities, sexual orientations or country of origin. But the big thing for me is also about race, because we have such a large percentage of BAME students - and they're the very students where social mobility is so difficult for them to actually achieve. Through the work we're doing on social mobility] if I could close the BAME attainment gap and get these students into fantastic employment, that would be a real achievement.

From your campus you can see the City of London in the background. Is it a challenge to make sure that somebody standing in your campus looking at all of those skyscrapers, thinks, ‘yes I can and I will get a career in the City’? 

It's the analogy of standing on the Thames, looking across the shore at these opportunities, to actually having a bridge across the Thames where you're running across to your opportunities. What really excites me about this work is the opportunity to have some fantastic partnerships with businesses, connecting with them and also actually bringing them into the university, because I think we could learn a lot from businesses and they could help us to co-design some of our programmes, even potentially co-deliver them. It's about opening universities up so that they're actually really accessible and they feel like places where businesses and communities want to come in and work with us. If somebody says, ‘I've got an issue I need really to resolve in my business’ we want them to think ‘the University of Greenwich - they're great, responsive and agile, they’ll help us’.

How does the Medway campus fit in with the work of the wider university? 

Medway is a fabulous campus. It has our science and engineering provision, and also the Natural Resources Institute, which has saved millions of lives in Africa through its work on eliminating  blackflies in rivers, for example. I think it’s 11 out of 13 countries in Africa that no longer have river blindness because of their work. There's also lots of work around climate change, agriculture, food scarcity and food security. So, it’s really, really important work and it feeds into a region in Medway, where there's huge social deprivation and, historically, very low participation in universities. So, there’s a real opportunity to work with that community and make higher education much more accessible to them, but also to do some short courses and some upscaling and help to solve, crucially, real problems of the world. Medway is a really exciting campus - and what I really want in the future there is to have a university enterprise zone.

And how would you envisage that working? 

There are lots of models out there but Medway itself has quite a lot of enterprise parks for established businesses. So, I'm very keen to do something which is at a much earlier stage, incubating ideas. We could support that and link up with a partner. You could have students testing out their enterprising and entrepreneurship ideas while they're still at university. Then on the campus you would have an enterprise zone, which is really for very early stage businesses that need some space and perhaps some support. Ideally, I'd have wet and dry labs there, so we could have science and technology. Then they could springboard out into the enterprise parks. You end up with a sort of route through for new businesses, because lots of them actually don't survive, because they haven't had that early support. It's not just money, it's support around marketing, financing, legal support – all those basics that some of them just lack.