Read: Opportunities where they’re needed most
Spotlight on Shirley Congdon, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bradford. The University of Bradford has embraced its role as a catalyst for social mobility – in an area in which it is much needed.
“A local authority report in 2018 shows that Bradford is ranked as the fifth most income deprived area in England. Here, Vice-Chancellor Shirley Congdon speaks to the Social Mobility Pledge about how the University of Bradford is helping to address this”
Q// You arrived at the university last summer. So I guess you just about had enough time to get into this role and set the agenda, when all of a sudden lockdown hit?
A// Yes exactly. I set about thinking what I wanted to achieve as vice chancellor and took the senior management team and the staff back to what it is that Bradford is about. What do we really care about? What do we want to make a difference to? Overwhelmingly, we took ourselves right back to social inclusion, social mobility, driving that for the city of Bradford, the region, the North and beyond, through our teaching, research and knowledge exchange. So we’re absolutely committed to working in partnership with everybody in our region to drive this agenda.
Q// It matters to you personally as well - your journey hasn’t necessarily been a typical one into becoming a VC. How do you end up becoming a vice chancellor when you set out your career training as a nurse?
University of Bradford
A// I think it’s all about having a commitment from a very young age to want to make a difference, and a real meaningful difference. And for that difference to impact on people’s lives, whether that be at a macro or micro level. That desire transcends a lot of professions, including nursing where it’s all about people and making a difference to healthy happy lives at an individual and a population level. As I went through my career, I began to realise that I could maybe make a bigger difference if I started to get involved in education. That led me to move into academia. Seeing lives and the whole system approach to making societies fairer, just transcended all of my career.
Q// One of the things that the university’s been brilliantly involved in over the last few years has been the Bradford opportunity area. And it’s really looked at this link between health and education, hasn’t it?
A// It has. I think the difference with the Bradford opportunity area is it’s focused on four priority areas, one of which is using evidence and research to remove barriers to learning. The other ones [are] improving access to rewarding careers, literacy and the quality of leadership and teaching in the schools. Rather than focusing on the areas of say, early years or post-16, it’s taken more of a holistic approach and centred its activities on trying to work out and understand, for the long term, generating an evidence base that we can use for the future.
Q// When we at the Social Mobility Pledge visited the Bradford opportunity area everybody was just so fired up about what you were doing. It was striking how you were using evidence to come up with some simple but really powerful steps like the Glasses for Classes project, for example. Tell us about that.
A Social Mobility Pledge visit to the University
A// The work that’s been going on for a number of years now with the university and the NHS hospital trust has laid the foundations for the application of applied health research, focusing on people in the ‘born in Bradford’ study. That allowed the opportunity area and the applied research teams to work together to look at the things that affect people every day, and children’s chances. The obvious one was a lot of children in Bradford do have problems with their eyesight. Just a simple intervention of testing the children’s eyes in school led to the initiative, Glasses for Classes, where you go to the people and to the children in schools rather than assuming that people will actually go to the opticians and get their children’s eyes tested. So it’s understanding the communities and their needs and their values and their concerns in order to make an impact. If it’s not centred in the community, then I don’t think you will get the impact.
Q// And it’s really about having those local priorities owned by communities so that they’re not having change done to them, they’re fundamentally part of it themselves.
A// That’s right. The term we’re using is a ‘city collaboratory’. It’s a bit of a made-up word but it’s meant to indicate that we are working in collaboration with the people of Bradford and asking them what their problems are; and then identifying, if we put our efforts in this part of our active action research and applied research, that would make a bigger difference. It’s generating the problems from the community’s perspective that we want to solve.
Q// Tell us a bit about the role of Bradford University within the opportunity area and how you feel the university has contributed towards it.
A// I sit on the opportunity area board and a lot of our academics are involved in it in different ways. One of the key things is our access and participation plan that we’ve developed in collaboration with the opportunity area. [It’s] helping us to develop a whole system approach to the pipeline of students, starting off as young people living in the community and maybe being part of the ‘born in Bradford’ study, and moving through and taking all of that learning, and integrating it into every step of the educational pathway. With the university perceived as being at the end, it actually needs to be involved in the beginning as well, so that it can learn how our young people and our families live and learn together and the best mechanisms and approaches that we can use to keep narrowing the attainment gap. Also, making sure that it’s connected and that the university isn’t seen as isolated, but equally, our approaches are connected right across the educational pathway. We can’t be successful in narrowing the attainment gap, and enhancing social mobility, if we do this in isolation. It won’t work - we won’t crack the issue of working class boys [performing poorly academically], for example, if we don’t work with the schools in the areas in Bradford south where there are particular concerns.