Prof Julie Sanders on Royal Holloway's commitment to being a university of social purpose
In this episode of the Leading with Purpose podcast, Rt Hon Justine Greening interviews Professor Julie Sanders, Vice Chancellor of Royal Holloway University of London. They discuss the transformation of the university into a purpose-driven institution, emphasising social good, community engagement, and the importance of student and staff involvement in shaping the university's mission. Julie shares insights on the role of international students, the need for collaboration with employers, and the significance of values-led education in fostering social mobility and leadership among students.
Transcript
Rt Hon Justine Greening (00:01.464)
Welcome to our Leading with Purpose podcast. This is where we interview the leaders of organisations who are really putting purpose at the heart of those organisations and talk to them about why they feel it matters so much. And I'm delighted today to be joined by Professor Julie Sanders. She's Vice Chancellor and Principal at Royal Holloway University of London. And really from my perspective is one of almost a new generation of Vice Chancellors coming through that...
Julie Sanders (00:15.95)
.
Rt Hon Justine Greening (00:30.05)
are steadily transforming their universities and really bringing a much more purpose-driven, mission-driven lens to them perhaps than we've ever seen before. Julie, it's brilliant to have you on this Leading with Purpose podcast. So tell us a little, let's start off by telling us a little bit about Royal Holloway and then we'll get onto how you are transforming the university and clarifying its purpose and all of that.
Julie Sanders (00:58.86)
Well, thank you so much, Justine, and delighted to take part in this today. yeah, let me tell you a little bit about Royal Holloway. We're about 13,000 students and about two and a half thousand colleagues, although that doesn't fully take account actually of many hundreds of students studying with us on University of London worldwide, which are online programs as well and using recognised teaching centres around the world. And that's from
of Lima to Lahore, but it's a fantastically diverse student community. Many of our students now are first in family or preschool mill derivation background. We are many faiths and none as I often say. We have a lot of estranged and care experienced students, we have a lot of neurodiversity identified, we have 40 % of our students who commute.
as opposed to being that conventional idea of a residential student. So in all kinds of ways, we are thinking really, really hard about being where our students need us to be. And we have this phrase of it being about for what matters at Royal Holloway. But I suppose what matters has mattered for a very long time. Royal Holloway is a university founded of two amazing 19th century women's colleges, Royal Holloway College and
Bedford College. So we're one university formed from these two amazing institutions that were all about being inclusive and being relevant from the very start. There's a great phrase in the Royal Holloway Deed of Foundation about arts and sciences adapted to the needs of the modern times. And that could be a mission statement written yesterday, really. So the challenge to ourselves has been to really think about that in a future facing way. How
Rt Hon Justine Greening (02:40.854)
Okay? Okay? Okay.
Julie Sanders (02:50.56)
Are we going to be as imaginative, as inclusive as our forebears were? And that's really where wanting to be a university of social purpose is at.
Rt Hon Justine Greening (03:02.434)
And that's what you called it. And I was over on your Egham campus, which is just a wonderful, beautiful campus with an incredible set of buildings. on the week that you launched that, that strategy, this university of social purpose. mean, from your perspective, Julie, this obviously matters to you, but tell us why actually on a personal level, you want to put that right at the heart of what
Royal Hallway now stands for.
Julie Sanders (03:34.2)
So I suppose it's been this amazing journey. A new vice chancellor coming in is often tasked with trying to create a strategy. And I wanted to take time to do that properly, engaging with colleagues, but really understanding from colleagues and students and alumni and partners, kind of what mattered about Royal Holloway for them, but also to challenge them and us to be.
Rt Hon Justine Greening (03:44.206)
Mm-hmm.
Julie Sanders (04:00.45)
future-facing. So it's called RH 2030s quite deliberately to take us into that complex decade when we know there's going to be a new set of challenges for higher education as if there weren't enough right now. But for me, it was also echoing what I saw in the kind of in the bricks and mortar of the place, in the history place. As you say, we teach both in Egham and Central London, but you have this amazing Surrey campus with the original.
founders building of Royal Holloway College and so you touch history every day but I often say it's not enough just to touch the history, you have to take that as a challenge to yourselves and social good is at the heart of so many universities charters and original founding but I think finding our way back to that and really asking ourselves how do you put that at heart of things and make that relevant locally and globally, make that a
a North Star for all of the decision making and to be truly values led because values can't just be words on a wall. They need to actually frame the decisions that you make and take and the way in which you make and take those decisions. So co-creating that strategy with colleagues, with students, with partners, with local schools as well was really important to me. And I guess it is a driver social mobility's
Rt Hon Justine Greening (05:12.142)
Mm-hmm.
Julie Sanders (05:22.434)
something that I think the higher education sector, it's one of its major achievements of recent decades and I'm a product of it and that's really important therefore that I want to pay it forward in a way and Royal Holloway offered me and I hope the whole community this amazing opportunity to respond to a new generation of students and issues and needs.
Rt Hon Justine Greening (05:27.856)
Mmm, mmm, that's really great.
Rt Hon Justine Greening (05:33.046)
You
Julie Sanders (05:49.494)
and to put a university at the heart of all of those communities.
Rt Hon Justine Greening (05:54.154)
And I think it's such a good point about the fact that it's easy to forget that so many universities really had a mission at the heart of them. You know, as you say, Royal Holloway is such a classic example, but you know, I can think of others where they start off as this trades-based, vocational set of colleges, and almost over time, you know, the risk is you sort of almost forget that inspiration and that mission. You know, often...
for Royal Holloway at a time when that would have been probably quite challenging almost for a wider community, know, this sense of women getting education at that level, you know, hang on a second, you know, does that really work in that society? And I think it's almost tapping back into that energy and activism, I think, of universities as engines of social change, literally.
Julie Sanders (06:33.098)
.
Julie Sanders (06:45.453)
.
Rt Hon Justine Greening (06:51.016)
delivering it and you and I both know that on a personal level literally this thing for both of us that opened doors I mean literally allowed us to walk through into a new landscape of life that I certainly couldn't have even visualised until I went to university but I think when I was with you last month during the lecture as part of strategy week what really struck me was the students engagement in this and
just how intuitive it is for them. And Julie, your sense for your students, in a way, they are a generation that's very connected back into social values, aren't they? Perhaps more than, I'd say perhaps more than mine, I don't know.
Julie Sanders (07:34.5)
They've been an incredible inspiration to me. It's been really moving to see the ways in which they have engaged with and helped shape and help drive the strategy. And I'm absolutely owning it now it's on its feet as well. And it's a thing that I love. I mean, you use the word energy and I feel like tapping into that energy of this amazing Royal Holloway.
Rt Hon Justine Greening (07:56.792)
Yeah.
Julie Sanders (07:58.692)
community. And yes, there were some great structures that enabled us to get that student voice and involvement in the process, which has not always been my experience of trying to build strategy. So we have a fantastic thing called the RH100 panel and students can be trained and paid to serve on these panels and they take on all sorts of issue based engagement through an academic year. So it's a great skills development thing for them, but it's a massive
resource for us of great minds and great minds that are really asking challenging questions, but they also turned up for workshops and events. Even the sports team were involved in wanting to do a new tender for their kit and they completely aligned that up with the strategy. They may put the values, our four values of being open, daring, respectful and innovative at the heart and now they're actually inscribed on the collar.
Rt Hon Justine Greening (08:48.936)
Thank you.
Julie Sanders (08:57.42)
of the kits because the students said to me, so we put the values on every time that we take part in a competition or just practice. And, you know, they mean something to us. And they saw that history of activism in the university's past, and they wanted to make that meaningful for them. So I think they absolutely got social purpose from day one in a way that being entirely honest, I think with some of our governing body and others.
Rt Hon Justine Greening (09:03.981)
Yeah.
Julie Sanders (09:26.232)
You know, I was constantly explaining and rationalising and this is why it should be at the heart. And that was fine. We went on a journey with that process of articulation and exploration. But actually the students were there more quickly than any of us really, because for them, they want their university degree to do good in the world. They are absolutely committed to whether that's solving global challenges through scientific endeavor.
through cultural engagement or through their volunteering and extracurricular, they see that all of a piece. It's seamless for them. And I think that's really beholden on us to understand and to respond to. And it was equally brilliant bringing on a group of school students from nearby Feltham with a number of the partner schools that we work with there to really encourage a confidence about accessing university and what university
can be, whether they come to Royal Holloway or not. And a group of them who had very kindly shown me around Feltham when I first arrived and told me about their work and their thinking, came over to the Egham campus and were paid mentors for the day on the strategy build. And we asked them the question, you know, so what would a university of social purpose mean to you? And they said, we would get what that is, but we want to know what it means for us. So.
how are we going to get leadership training in our degrees that will help us to put that social purpose to real application? Will there be opportunities to train in community organisation? And how will we think about the history of activism in our work? And we were just kind of rocked back and then leaning straight into that kind of energy. And so that's been a fantastic, Philip, to me and all of the teams involved in the strategy build to really have that partnership with students
Rt Hon Justine Greening (11:05.539)
you
Julie Sanders (11:19.497)
present and future actually in thinking about this so that we do have things that resonate with them at the heart of the strategy and at the heart of its ambitions, not least around inclusive education and research and around skills for choice and opportunity.
Rt Hon Justine Greening (11:35.234)
And I think what's important to me is this recognition that comes through, is actually this is more about getting a degree, isn't it? It's not just about, you know, getting a degree in criminology, economics, whatever it is. It's about saying that you are going to be somebody that takes your place in the world and what you're helping to create are people who can, on a very personal level, show some leadership.
and be people who can be part of a solution. And I think that sort of mindset really matters. And I think it is about social mobility as well in a way because it's very easy to sort of feel like somebody else gets to do that shaping, actually. I think a lot of us grow up seeing other people running things, other people at the top in politics, not people like us.
Julie Sanders (12:30.566)
Okay.
Rt Hon Justine Greening (12:33.27)
I think if you are at a university like Royal Holloway where actually the assumption is you will be one of those people that is shaping and that's part of what you will need to do. I think that's a very, very different mindset that you're helping, which is in a good way, your students to have. One of the other areas I wanted to ask you about was really the staff in a sense, because I guess, you know, for all those...
Julie Sanders (12:58.761)
.
Rt Hon Justine Greening (13:02.158)
you know, that brilliant team you've got that if you like day to day are doing the sort of hard yards of making sure all of this happens on the ground. How have you gone about almost binding them in? What's it being like compared to the students? What are some of the things that they've said in a sense that they wanted part of this that again, maybe you were surprised about?
Julie Sanders (13:26.484)
So I think it's been again really important for me and all of the people involved in the sort of senior leadership team to be in that classic phrase of being in listening mode. So we've very much identified five areas of strength that really recognise the kind of research and educational heartland of the place and I think the way that people have come around those and their big
challenge led, they're deliberately, they're not about a discipline, they're deliberately cross disciplinary, they're deliberately interconnected. But those five areas of strength in areas like climate and biodiversity, health and wellbeing, addressing inequalities, culture and creativity and new technologies, and actually saying, you know, this is what we're doing that's great, this is already happening, how do we dial it up? And how do we make it mean for our students?
I think felt like the right way to come around things so that people did turn up for creative conversations and engage. And it wasn't all plain sailing. And it's really important to listen to the challenges and the questions and the things that people are grappling with at the moment. But people care. know, wherever I've worked on the whole at universities, I think you've used the phrase before, it's an incredibly vocational sector. You know, the majority of people are intrinsically motivated to do a great job.
And they want the thing, just as I do, that gets their head off the pillow in the morning and makes them feel proud of coming. So, know, graduation ceremonies are this great kind of fulcrum point for me where I often say to people, thank you to all of those who are volunteering or feeding people or, you know, processing or doing whatever. But actually, even if you're not, come along and just get a bit of the buzz because you're all part of this story. You all produce these amazing, brilliant futures.
Rt Hon Justine Greening (15:12.931)
Hmm.
Julie Sanders (15:17.155)
So it's been a lot of listening and it will continue to be a lot of listening. Things need to mean to people. I absolutely get that. But I felt like there was actually people wanted to have that shared story, that shared purpose. So building the values and then really questioning ourselves and continuing to question ourselves. But how do you put values in action? How do you lead through values? How do you really make purpose something of practice is, you know, is at the heart of the work we've done.
And so I often just have lots and lots of coffee with people, colleagues and students, because those conversations are incredibly mind expanding for me about how things are landing with people, the journey they want to take through these ambitions and futures, but also understanding what brought people here and what motivates them, what makes them tick is really, really important.
Rt Hon Justine Greening (16:13.132)
In the end, I mean, as a Secretary of State, I always used to pick an office that was as far away from the entrance to the building as possible, mainly just so that I walked through and met the maximum number of people, because, you know, it's easy to think, well, you know, what does that matter? The answer is, it helps you build this mosaic of insight. But also for me as a Secretary of State, I was seeing people who probably...
wouldn't be coming in to brief me on policy because they'd be in a different team and just the chance every month to just meet hundreds of people in the lift and corridor to sort of let them know who I was and to hear from them. I mean, honestly, you couldn't have organised that. And so I think it's hugely important from a cultural perspective for you to be seen to be doing all of that.
Julie Sanders (17:04.654)
Yeah, it's fantastically important.
Yeah, I mean, we have that value of being open and it's really important that I as a vice-chancellor absolutely live that every day. yeah, going to get coffee from the furthest flung point is really important because actually people stop, you know, it's so much more easy to approach the vice-chancellor when she's, you know, dashing across the campus than coming to a formal office, which feels loaded with all kinds of anxiety and expectation.
Rt Hon Justine Greening (17:34.604)
Yeah.
Julie Sanders (17:37.179)
But it's also me getting to understand the different roles that, as I say, you know, really, really keep the lights on. And I mean that in the very best sense. you know, our, our estates team are a wonder. We have this beautiful campus in Egham and it is a living campus and we use it for study and we use it for wellbeing and we do all those things. And like, you know, it's really important to feed that back to the team doing the work. But actually one of the things one of the teams said to me is we're also, we're frontline recruiters for you, Julie.
Because on a weekend, people, local people are walking their dogs and they'll often ask us, you know, why should my son, daughter go to university or why should my son, daughter come to Royal Holloway? And they said, well, now we can answer it because we know what the strategy is. We know what the direction is and we can know that. And I think that's such a great thing. It's everybody's story and we're all ambassadors and we can all open the doors. As you said, we talked here about having kind of open gates.
Rt Hon Justine Greening (18:05.356)
Mm-hmm.
Rt Hon Justine Greening (18:08.877)
Yeah.
Rt Hon Justine Greening (18:20.462)
Mmm.
Rt Hon Justine Greening (18:26.734)
I
Julie Sanders (18:33.431)
open arms, welcoming the communities that we serve in, but also I hope everyone feeling confident to speak on behalf of the university.
Rt Hon Justine Greening (18:43.706)
It's really brilliant stuff and I guess the other aspect of it I just wanted to quickly ask you about was that community piece. You've touched on it in a way. We talked about local schools, we talked about students, we talked about staff. What do you think being a University of Social Purpose in practice will mean differently almost for the community? How do you think they'll get a sense of this new strategy rolling out and what it means for them?
Julie Sanders (19:09.583)
And we've deliberately engaged all the way along and we have different communities. And I think that's one of the sort of joys, but also the challenges of this place for me and that, you know, here we are, have a large residential campus in Egham in Surrey though, to which many students also commute. So we have Surrey and Berkshire and I need to understand all of the local authority and the local business context of that and the local community. We have central London.
Rt Hon Justine Greening (19:16.696)
Yes.
Julie Sanders (19:36.367)
And so we're also working with the mayor's office. We're working in Camden. We're working across actually then South London where a lot of our students come from. So it's many places and spaces. When I talk about this as a place-based organization, it's not one place, it's many places. And that kind of complex cultural geography is really important for me and all of the teams to kind of understand. And then...
Rt Hon Justine Greening (19:50.126)
You
Julie Sanders (20:01.398)
We do have partnerships and collaboration as one of the core ambitions and being civic minded and globally engaged because it's really important that we work across those spaces. So yes, we've just signed a civic agreement with Surrey County Council and University of Surrey and University of Creative Arts, all about attending to their four priority areas, which align beautifully with the strategy, have to say, because they're about sustainable economy and
green skills and greener futures, if they're about health inequalities and about empowering and thriving communities. And if that's not social purpose, then I don't know what is. So I hope that will mean.
Rt Hon Justine Greening (20:37.294)
And so this is you and your counterpart universities coming together really to sort of say, look, we're all in the same place. Let's be aligned.
Julie Sanders (20:48.387)
Exactly, but also really listening to the different communities, businesses, from everything from mental health trusts through to the Chamber of Commerce, through to the schools, to the FE colleges. And it can't be that parachuting in model of research and impact. It's all about needs-based analysis. So how will it change us? Well, I think it will build on work that's been going on a long time. I mean, there's a several decade long tradition.
Rt Hon Justine Greening (21:15.702)
Yeah.
Julie Sanders (21:16.005)
of the most amazing student volunteering here, working with community groups and out in the community, so much to learn from them, but really scaling that so that our research, but also the way that our programmes are being shaped and the skills that we're enabling the students to be able to articulate and take forward are looking at what is needed, be it across London, be it across Surrey and Berkshire, from Woking to Windsor, as I often say.
but really listening and really doing a needs-based analysis and helping with the evaluation of the impact of the work that we do. So we will form a social purpose innovation hub to really drive this out and to really give partners that clear front door into us to say, we would really like to work with you, Royal Holloway, on projects around this. And it's been interesting taking this globally and seeing how it resonates there as well. So...
That's been heartening to me because I often say that being place-based and being hyperlocal doesn't mean that you're not global. In fact, it should be a virtuous circle.
Rt Hon Justine Greening (22:16.556)
Yeah, tell us a little bit more about that, Julie. That's really interesting.
Julie Sanders (22:19.985)
So, you and I learned a lot from other great civic universities that I worked at in the past at Nottingham and in Newcastle, and actually I started my career at Keele, all of which have this amazing kind of dedication to place, but also to thinking more widely. But one of the things I said at the launch of the civic agreement in Surrey was, you know, this is a huge opportunity for students, but it's also a huge opportunity to realise what our students bring us.
And there's been such a rhetoric around international students recently, but actually international students come, they contribute hugely to communities in multiple ways, from work experience to volunteering, to being part of kind of a cultural diversity, but they go on to be the global leaders of the world. And I don't just mean prime ministers, I mean, they're in a heat map of companies of all kinds, they're entrepreneurs.
That's got to be good for a Surrey County Council or for the Mayor of London's London Growth Agenda to make London the global city. International students will be a driver of that. They're friends for life and they work across a range of scales and employers. They are future employees. They're networks for our students, which are so important. So I think we don't talk enough.
Rt Hon Justine Greening (23:25.198)
Mm-hmm.
Julie Sanders (23:36.805)
when we talk about the value of international students, about that incredible connectivity that they bring us long, long into the future.
Rt Hon Justine Greening (23:47.15)
I guess, you know, pulling all of this together. So you've got the RH 2030 strategy. You've got this almost next generation of students. You've aligned across, you know, internally within the university and externally. Just then for almost employers and businesses. Because in a sense, you are, you're, you're at the, I was going to say the end. I don't know that that's quite right, but a talent pipeline.
where you, and this is the reason why higher education is so important because it has that scale to really drive the pipeline back into the community. But then that final relationship with employers under this new strategy, Julie works how for you? I mean, obviously you're part of the purpose coalition that is full of businesses and employers that really care about always doing exactly, these are businesses with social purpose in a sense.
Julie Sanders (24:37.251)
Yeah.
Rt Hon Justine Greening (24:45.408)
And so how do you see that relationship working now you've you're sort of shifting into this next phase of your Royal Holloway strategy.
Julie Sanders (24:54.567)
So it's so exciting for us to be part of the Purpose Coalition and I was really grateful to you in the lecture that you've mentioned about the articulation of not just that pipeline but helping employers at all scales actually to effectively do their own access and participation plans. You know we live and breathe that and it's been really important actually when we were doing the RH2030s work for me to say
Rt Hon Justine Greening (25:15.266)
Indeed.
Julie Sanders (25:21.001)
These bodies of work that we do as organisations like the APPs, as they get called for short, are not separate from the strategy. They should be absolutely nested within because they're aligned to the values. But you're so right that we often talk about graduate outcomes and we talk about trying to get beyond a very blunt kind of salary measure of that or a 15 month salary measure of that. But we have to help the employers.
Rt Hon Justine Greening (25:27.694)
Thank
Julie Sanders (25:45.672)
to optimise as it were, make the most of this incredible generation of students that I'm seeing that certainly made me throw my life up in the air and come back south to be at Royal Holloway because it should be that sort of seamless transition and it's clearly not at the moment in all kinds of ways. can help, universities can help with that by thinking about content of courses but also how we, this is a phrase that one of the Feltham
Rt Hon Justine Greening (25:54.754)
You hear? Okay.
Rt Hon Justine Greening (26:05.41)
Yeah, absolutely.
Julie Sanders (26:13.148)
students gave me actually is that how are going to hold my hand through a degree and into a career? But we need to, in a sense, we need to be all joined up in one big circle and to understand what those handovers are and what they require because we've done this amazing work of diversification. But if we don't make that a seamless next step into a career portfolio, not into single pathways necessarily. And that's why I'm so excited about what
Rt Hon Justine Greening (26:27.182)
correct.
Rt Hon Justine Greening (26:35.214)
Mmm. Right.
Julie Sanders (26:41.107)
purpose is doing because that bringing together of the student voice, the student ambassadors of companies with real ambition and hunger, I think, to be purpose led in this space and to be socially responsible. It's a massive opportunity to get this right. And it's so needed for all of these growth agendas that we're hearing about from government, from local authorities, from the big metropolitan cities.
This feels like everything to play for for me.
Rt Hon Justine Greening (27:13.422)
absolutely right and I think we're trying to get everybody lined up really in the same direction and I guess the only fine point I might make is sometimes I see it as almost like a wheel with spokes and actually in a sense it matters less where you grab one of the spokes and you know push the wheel than just that you're pushing it in the right direction that is all momentum and I think through certainly through the purpose coaching work we're just
One of the things I've loved most about it is just finding so many like-minded people but from such different parts of our society and I think together we can really do some really important things. Julie, it's just been brilliant having you on the Leading with Purpose podcast. I think it's fantastic what you're doing at Royal Holloway. I absolutely loved getting a chance to go and meet the students. I agree it's really exciting and...
you know, when I look ahead for all the challenges that we face, the reason I love doing all this work on social mobility and on the purpose coalition is because I meet that talent and that potential and just think, you know, these are, these are great people and they give me hope for the future. And I think we're trying to create a version of the future where they can really do their best and thrive. So it's been brilliant having you, Julie. Thank you so much and looking forward to continuing our work together.
Julie Sanders (28:41.394)
Thank you. It's been an absolute pleasure as always, Justine.
