Unleashing Potential: Solent University's Commitment to Social Mobility and Innovation
In today's episode, our host, Justine Greening, sits down with Professor James Knowles, the Vice Chancellor of Solent University. Solent University is a unique institution that combines a rich history dating back to the 1850s with a modern approach to education. Known for its maritime specialty and its ability to adapt to the changing needs of industries, Solent University plays a vital role in supplying highly skilled individuals to businesses in the region. The university takes pride in its state-of-the-art facilities, providing students with a vibrant learning environment that prepares them for the future. In this episode, we delve into Solent's commitment to social mobility and how it strives to make education accessible to all. Join us as we explore the dynamic and innovative world of Solent University.
Transcript
Justine Greening:
Welcome to this week's Fit for Purpose podcast. This week, I'm joined by Professor James Knowles. He's the Vice Chancellor of Solent University, which is a fantastic university and part of the Purpose coalition as well. James, welcome to the podcast. And first of all, tell us a little bit about Solent and the sorts of students you have, but also give us a little bit of the sense of the fabric of the place that people are being.
James Knowles:
Okay, well, listen, thank you, Justine, for inviting me to talk to you. I think there's two things about Solent. I mean, the first of all, funnily enough, it's actually quite an old institution, but it's also a very new institution. So we actually only got degree awarding powers in 2005. But the institutions that lie behind Solent date back into the 1850s, in fact, to the Great Exhibition. And so there was an art college, there was a techno college, a College of Technology School of Art was found in 1855, and all of these feed into the institution. We also, of course, have a very important maritime speciality with the Warsaw School. So I think the thing to say about Solent, Southampton Solent, is exactly that, that it's all about really feeding the city in all sorts of know.
James Knowles:
We provide highly educated staff for all sorts of businesses across the region, across the city. And if you look back at our history, there was a period after the war when we desperately needed bakers in Southampton, and Solent actually stood up. The Institute of Technology produced bakers when we needed builders to rebuild the city. After the war, it was Solent who educated the builders. And that tradition runs through the DNA of the place. We're very much about making a cajun of students who are work ready, future ready and world ready in the way that we talk about it. That skills based curriculum is really important to us and we're very successful at it. And we do that in a really kind of as you alluded to in a really rather wonderful set of space.
James Knowles:
We're right on the edge of the city centre by this kind of great set of parks, which runs through Southampton, and we have absolutely fantastic facilities. Over the years, we've consolidated onto the East Park campus and as a result, we have really wonderful sports facilities. We have fantastic maritime simulation and other simulation facilities. The maritime facilities are absolutely world leading, and we also have great spaces for the students. So we have the Spark Building, which has this rather wonderful red pod in the middle of it, which it looks a little bit like a coffee bean. It isn't. It's the shape of a hull of a ship, in fact. But this creates this fantastic working space, this fantastic teaching space for the student.
James Knowles:
And I think one of the distinctive features about the university is that quality of its facilities which feeds into the education. I think it really helps the students feel that being at university is actually a really important and different experience.
Justine Greening:
I think it's a really vibrant place. That's how I would describe it. When you walk into the Spark building, it genuinely is a place where you feel like you want to learn and study, and the space is incredibly positive for people. But certainly, having been in the maritime element of the university and literally seen the space where people are studying there, you actually get to learn by driving a particular vessel into a particular space. This is not a sort of theoretical learning space, it's the very practical learning space for an industry that, as I know, spent years living in. Southampton is at the heart of really the city's local economy. Obviously, you've got freeport coming in the coming years. So I guess Solent James has constantly reinvented itself with the city over time, but with some of these specialisms, like maritime as a constant through that whole process.
James Knowles:
Yeah, and I think that's right. And I think you can see that reinvention carrying on. I mean, in one sense, the simulation suite, the maritime simulation is part of that reinvention because in the past, the way you learned to pilot a ship is you had to do it physically in the space. Now, like the airline industry, the shipping industry is really debating the role of simulation. And as we move into autonomous shipping, as we move into sort of more sustainable forms of kind of moving goods around the world, those kind of simulations of that activity become more and more important. Or you look at something like creative media. We've just installed a virtual production suite in the basement of the building. This is the way that films are going to be made in the future.
James Knowles:
It uses a computer design engine rather than building the set, and you then project that onto a huge green screen and the actors work inside that. That absolutely kind of cutting edge technology is exactly part of that reinvention. And I think as we look forward over the next five years, five and ten years indeed, we can see the way that technology is changing so quickly and we need to actually find ways of helping our students work with, adapt to, and then kind of actually run with that technology in new ways.
Justine Greening:
And we're really proud having Solon as part of the purpose coalition. And obviously that focus we have is around social mobility. But the university itself, it's really prided itself in driving social mobility, not just within that very local, immediate community around it. As you said, it's on the edge of the city centre, but more broadly across the region and beyond for people who are less familiar with Solen. Give us a little bit of a sense of that social mobility work that you do to really allow people to access what is a fantastic university to learn in.
James Knowles:
Yeah, so it's worth. Just saying sitting on the edge of the city is very important to us because we actually sit between the city centre and one of the poorest communities in the area, the St. Mary's community. It's a fantastic community full of kind of vibrant life and actually kind of great community action to improve the loss of its own citizens. So in one sense we learn from that. I think as a model we do lots of things, particularly around when it comes to social mobility, raising educational attainment. It's no good at sort of sitting as a university and always waiting for the students to come to you. We've got to think of ways of creating those pipelines and helping people to actually sort of have the aspiration have the skills and the abilities to make a really good use of this education.
James Knowles:
So we do a great deal, for example, in the More maths program where we work, particularly with students, can work on their math skills and raise that attainment and it's really very important to us is actually run by one of our alumni. And one of the lovely things about Solent is the way that students and former students come back and feed that education process. We run a Step into Success program which is very much about working with local schools, with about 204 local schools. And I also think the other sort of thing is important is we have a Ready readers program. I'm a literature specialist, so I'm a great believer in that that ability to read being one of the things that really unlocks those doors of imagination and those doors of creativity. And those programs are part of a strategic approach. So we work with the Southampton Education Forum, we work with local colleges. We're always looking for ways that we can leverage those connections so that, for example, shared continuing professional development between staff at university and schools.
James Knowles:
Or the way that we can work on transition projects to help students come into university and do better when they arrive. And that needs to start earlier than when you arrive at the university. It's building that kind of tertiary pipeline, that tertiary network which really then helps people. And we work actually with Southampton University on the Uni Connect partnership across the region to bring that out. So there are specific initiatives, there are strategic approaches, but it also is part of the way that we work with local employers. So part of raising aspirations is actually bringing the employers and the students together and we work very, very hard at that. We're very fortunate to have for a university of our kind quite a large amount of kind of funding which helps us work with local businesses. So we have innovation vouchers which actually help them kind of use the skills of our students, use the skills of our staff to solve their problems.
Justine Greening:
These are basically pieces of work where they can bring their challenges that they face as local employers to the university. And actually your students can be part of helping them overcome the challenges.
James Knowles:
That's right. And so what you get, what I'm looking for is a pipeline that takes students really from way before they start even thinking about university. So we talked about what kind of careers, what sort of things you want to do, how's your thinking. We give them the skills and the steps up to get them into university. We transition them properly and at the end of the process, we then transition them out into really good employment, which is fueled by the fact that the employers understand that we're here to sort of solve their problems, be they resource problems, be they research problems. That's what a university like Solent does.
Justine Greening:
And I think that there's a lot of win wins that come out of that. I mean, first of all, it means Solent has a great rating for student employment outcomes post degree. I think you're sort of number six in the country. But I guess the second point for this is the role that you then play in driving that broader economic growth. And I think from my perspective, having been an Education Secretary, this is often something that possibly in the policymaking sphere, people don't really dig into enough. That ability of a university like Solent to really play that role quite in quite grassroots, granular way, as you say, on allowing businesses themselves to continue to grow and create more opportunities.
James Knowles:
I mean, you can talk about it in sort of hard figures. You could talk about the fact that for graduate startups we're 11th in the UK and that contributes to the local economy. Or you can talk about the fact we have a GVA figure which is actually a little bit out of date, but was about 270,000,000 in 2017. But that's not actually for me, really. The point is, one of the things that really struck me when I arrived at Solana about six months ago was the warmth of the business community and the kind of the other sector organizations towards Solan and the recognition of the kind of benefit we bring to the region. So I think, for example, our staff live in the region, which about 37% of the staff live in the region. With the other university, Southampton, we contribute about 100 million a year. In terms of international students coming, you can see all of those things, but it's the value added that people recognize.
James Knowles:
There was a wonderful moment where one of the chairs of the National Health Service Trust stood up and talked about some films that Solan students have made about mental health and about the role of the National Health Service and talked about how these films had really helped save lives in the region. It's that value added and that values piece which I think universities really bring to the party.
Justine Greening:
And do you feel that's a growing opportunity for something. When you look ahead at for you as Vice Chancellor, where the university goes next, it's potentially a really exciting future, isn't it, to build on that strong foundation you've got.
James Knowles:
It is, but I would also have to be very honest with you and say that it's a very challenged future. And I think, Justin, you will know what I'm about to say. I think there's two things. I think we have a cost of living crisis, which you can already see, but it's also a cost of learning crisis. Many of my students come from poorer backgrounds, from more diverse backgrounds and for them the scale of the debt and the length of the repayment is beginning to become a deterrent. And I think as a country we need to think that through very carefully because education isn't just about individual benefit, there's socioeconomic benefit we all gain. If we want teachers and doctors and health workers to help us, we've got to train them and we've got to help them get those qualifications. So that's one, I think, part of it, and then the other sort of part of it is that and it's a very difficult thing to talk about, but it is that the amount of fee income that we now receive has declined in value since it was last set.
James Knowles:
And I absolutely understand it's very difficult for anyone to argue to sort of raise fees when we are in such difficult circumstances financially. But if we want universities to carry on being the motors of our regional economies, of being these kind of ladders to opportunity for people, then there has to be a way of finding that we can fund it because these activities do need themselves to be funded and supported. And we can't carry on with the current financial model and continue to do all the things that we really want to do to build our city and our region and the country.
Justine Greening:
And I think it's long overdue to now revisit that student finance system. And I think the point you're making is a really important one, which is if we want sustained impact from universities in and of themselves for their students, but then beyond that, then actually what you need is a sustainable approach to higher education finance. And I think that's really probably the most fundamental challenge the sector faces right now in many respects because it's almost a precursor for being able to do any of those other things that are hugely valuable that you've just been talking about.
James Knowles:
Yeah, I think that's absolutely right and I think the truth is that we can teach at a whole different variety of costs and ways of doing things. But many of the activities we've been talking about, particularly the ones of reaching out into school populations or reaching out into industry, these are the things that need funding. And it might be that we need to look at different ways of funding those aspects of our work alongside the core undergraduate teaching. And I think the other thing that's really important to remember is that in order to get the kind of academic excellence that Son really aspires to inspires to for our students again, you've got to have the facilities and the resources and the staff who actually really can support that kind of learning and all of that. We have to find mechanisms for making this be sort of sustainable, I think. And that's where we aren't at the moment.
Justine Greening:
And you talked about the staff and learning, it's sort of worth saying that whatever the challenge is actually Solon one of those few universities to get that Gold award for its TEF rating, just for people who are less familiar with Hei Chi policy. Explain what that means, but also in a sense, how brilliantly you've done to be able to get it.
James Knowles:
Well, you know what we're like in education, we love an acronym. Let's start with the acronym. KEF is the teaching excellence framework. It's kind of awarded every five years by the government. It's a peer review process. It looks at both the data for our student experience and our student outcome. So it looks at how well we're doing benchmarked against other institutions and it then also looks, it's a peer review process, so it looks at the way we strategize and talk about our education. So how do we work out that students are doing well or not doing well? How do we respond to that? And how do we drive change and innovation to really get the best results? That's what the teaching excellence framework is about.
James Knowles:
It's about academic excellence. So we were very pleased, I have to say, to get a triple goal. So yes, I wouldn't be a Vice Chancellor if I wasn't now going to bang the drum very, very carefully for the university. And very clearly triple Gold is very good because it's both the outcomes and it's the experiences, both parts of it. And it's the overall rating. There are only twelve other universities who've got the triple Gold. And Solon, we are a small institution, smaller than many other universities. And for us to do that well is a real marker of the kind of excellence that we achieved.
James Knowles:
And I think it's really sort of about that practice based, work ready, world ready, future ready education. The best thing about the TEF. Well, two really good things about it. It's a great endorsement of the hard work that staff put into the education of students and the way that the students then work with that and it fires their inspirations. But the other part of it is it's a really strong endorsement of that approach to education that we have, getting those students to be really work ready. Sometimes universities seem to be about doing great theoretical things or great sort of innovative new discoveries. What Sonent does is something really distinctive.
Justine Greening:
And different and I think it's very based around applied learning, as you say. It's that real world education. That means your graduates, it's more than work ready, isn't it? They're literally career ready for today's world, not the world maybe 510 years ago, but the one that they're actually going to be trying to be a success in. And I actually think there's a lot of learnings from this for earlier on in the education system, where actually we have perhaps a necessary academic focus, but actually that ability for a soul into this world to show why this education is so relevant and to make it utterly relevant. Those are lessons that I think we can learn more broadly, presumably.
James Knowles:
I think that's right. I think it's the combination of the practice based work and I think that's really important. Plus the kind of research work that we do, the more theoretical work. So it's the way that those come together and you think about it, it's combining, I suppose, if you like, the kind of knowledges that are represented by the hand, the head and the heart. And the heart is also really quite important. It's about the values and the ethics that we put and the sense of purpose that our students have. And we then try to encourage and fan those flames, really.
Justine Greening:
Wow. Very good way of putting it, actually, the hand, the head and the heart. Something, I think, to really reflect on it. And I guess the final area I really want to talk about in the podcast, James, is your own career, in a sense, because you know, so many people, they may be the first in their family to go to university and that whole higher education world is one that you don't really feel like you know much about. But I certainly think if you were asking young people going through the earlier education system what they want to be, where their career aspirations lies, I'm going to guess there won't be that many that say Vice Chancellor. And yet here you are, running this fantastic university and tell us a little bit about your own career, in a sense, and how you end up in this leadership role.
James Knowles:
Well, I think there's a couple of things to say, is that in one sense, I'm absolutely the product of my parents, which is very interesting. So my mother was a teacher and the bink that she brings to this and is very important, is that she was a mature student. She didn't do a degree as an undergraduate. She was one of that generation of women whose parents wouldn't pay for her to go to Oxford, and that was the point at which she couldn't get into. And so she became a bilingual secretary for the World Health Organization and brought up kids and then went back into teacher training and she did a B ed and then had a very, very sort of strong career. The way that she talked about transferring, she worked with children who were less able at the time. There was come some quite cruel ways of describing children with mental health and kind of mental disabilities and she worked with those children. And what she was very good at was finding things that transformed their lives, that gave them a real sense of their achievement.
James Knowles:
So that's maternal heritage and paternal heritage is equally interesting because my father was an engineer, so he did it as an apprenticeship. And he comes from that long tradition of people who think through their hands and think through numbers, so they learn by doing. So. My strong memory of my father buying a Meccano set as a Christmas present would be and basically that was his Meccano set. Yeah, that's right. So you have long generation of these engineers who do things. So I'm really a bit of a black sheep in that respect. Since I became a literary scholar, I think probably really influenced by my mother and I think all the way through that.
James Knowles:
What was important to me was the way that particularly writing gave you access to all sorts of other worlds and all sorts of other experiences. And it's that fantastic sort of imaginative capacity of great writers to give us access to experiences which we've never had and to have some understanding of them. So I took that and I took that out into teaching as a university lecturer. I taught in a very wide range of institutions. I taught in a polytechnic in the days when those existed. I taught in Scottish universities, I taught in universities in Ireland. And all of those different experiences kind of fed into that sense of the power of education to really drive social mobility for societies but transform individuals'lives. The best bits of teaching are when you have a student who's really struggle with something like a piece of Shakespeare and sudden you get that light bulb moment and they can really understand it.
James Knowles:
That's when, if you like, you've won. And that's a really great sort of moment. So I took that into my sense. Initially, a lot of work I did was on building research and building research capacity in young researchers. And then I moved into actually into running education at Royal Holloway University of London. And there it was very much about changing the kinds of students who came to the university. So we moved absolutely to be oriented on West London. So we became very much a university that had a majority of black and global majority students for the first time, 31% of the students were first in family.
James Knowles:
And that again really fed my sense of social inclusion being an absolutely key part of education. So I came to solemn with that sense of this is what a university can do. A university can be a ladder of opportunity for people, it can be a think tank for society, it can be a motor of economic and social change and those are the things that really drive me as a Vice Chancellor. So I tend to think of my job as being about really being an advocate for the university, about what a great experience university can be. And I'm still hugely enthusiastic about that. That's my passion. But equally, it's being an advocate for what universities can do for our society. And I think sometimes in the discussion we still forget that.
Justine Greening:
And I think it's so interesting, isn't it? Because you also grew up in a family where you literally saw the benefits of education firsthand, both for your mother and I guess your father as well. But then the profession that she was in as well was giving back. That's, in a sense, where your own sort of mentality went, but in your doing it in a different way. And I think you're apt right now that you're in a position where you've got a chance to shape a broader sector in a way with your ideas. I think the case that I've heard you make before on reform of higher education finance, I think those are incredibly important messages of leadership, in a sense, and on social mobility for a wider sector. And do you feel like the sector as a whole is more switched on to those sorts of points that you've just made around those different roles of a university and higher education in a wider country?
James Knowles:
Yes, I do think we are more Vice Chancellors are a changing breed. They're changing. The constitution of the Vice Chancellor pool is changing, as is the change in staff in higher education, much more diverse backgrounds, much more diverse experiences, and those are feeding into that. But I think there's also a recognition of that ability of universities to really sort of change the society in which we operate. And if you like, it's a little bit risky word to use, I might say. We are quite activist, vice Chancellors. In some ways. We're all driven by that sense of what we can do for our institutions to improve the situations in which we live.
Justine Greening:
And I think increasingly, as a sort of final point, doing that in partnership, as you say, in your case, working with your colleague, Vice Chancellor Mark Smith at Southampton, but increasingly almost showing how universities coming together, particularly at the local level, can really powerfully shape local strategies, in a way, and be the makers of those local strategies.
James Knowles:
So I think for Southampton, for example, we have a really interesting skills framework in Southampton which the council set up, that ties into the kind of the local skills plan. We can then sort of work on that. It needs to work through the schools as well. If we can get those kind of regional collaborations, that becomes a really powerful way for students having a language and a way of understanding their skills, which will take them from school right the way through to the marketplace. And just one last point I make, I think why Solent is such an interesting institution is that is its values that it brings. I mentioned before, one of the things I like about this university is the way that our alumni come back and provide projects and questions and briefs. They give experience to the students, they provide opportunities. That kind of economy of giving and returning and receiving, going round and round, is really powerful.
James Knowles:
And it's the way, again, that we get that sort of sense of creating a real learning community which is actually committed to doing good in its own context.
Justine Greening:
I think it's absolutely fantastic and certainly a really special place, actually, when you go and visit the university. So, James and all, thank you so much for doing the podcast with us. I think in the time that we've had, you made some absolutely superb points on the roles of universities. But also, I think I'd defy anyone not to listen to you and, hmm, maybe a career in higher education would be a career with a real sense of purpose that could really change lives for the better. And I think you've brought that alive for lots of people who will be watching and listening. So. Professor James Knoll, VC of Selma University. Thank you very much for doing the podcast.
James Knowles:
Thank you so much, Justine, for asking me. Cheers.
