Our highly valued and innovative staff ensure that our students benefit from a distinctive and innovative curriculum that builds academic excellence and provides opportunities to widen our students’ knowledge and experience.
As a socially progressive and inclusive institution, we welcome students from a diverse range of backgrounds, recognising the barriers that exist for many, and we support our students to successfully overcome these. We remain committed to widening access and offering high-quality support to our students to ensure their successes. Building on our commitment to equity, diversity, inclusion and participation, we are dedicated to being an anti-racist institution; one that actively opposes racism.
Our extensive range of sustained partnerships with industry, business, public and third sector partners, successfully demonstrates our commitment to making a positive impact on the world around us. This approach underpins and permeates our education programmes and enables our students to gain the knowledge, skills and experience they need to excel in a dynamic and evolving global environment.
Our entrepreneurial campus unlocks the potential of our people – staff and students - and creates an environment in which venture creation and growth thrives. Strathclyde is the leading entrepreneurial campus in Scotland, and we will cement this position over the course of the Strathclyde 2030 strategy.
We are an enabler of a successful economy and workforce for Scotland, the UK and the wider world. We do this through our flexible approaches to learning through upskilling, continuing professional development, apprenticeships, and post graduate study. This is supplemented by our approach to lifelong learning. We are proud to be one of the founding members of the Age-Friendly University (AFU) Global Network, which aims to foster intergenerational exchange and enable the exploration of Age-Friendly learning. We have a unique, life-course approach to learning and opportunity and aim to offer something of value to anyone, regardless of age or stage in life.
Our 2030 strategic plan strengthens our successful mission in attracting students to join our Strathclyde community, supporting their success through innovative programmes and student support, producing graduates capable of addressing national and global challenges.
Distinctive Strathclyde
Read more about our commitment to delivering outstanding education and student experience.
People First
We work in close partnership with our Students’ Union and student representatives to create an experience which is vibrant, distinctive and useful. We actively seek and are responsive to feedback from our students about their learner journey and the wider student experience.
Social & Environmental Sustainability
Our students and graduates bring the fruits of our research-led education for sustainability programme into their jobs, volunteering and entrepreneurial activity.
Process, Systems & Digital
We are committed to supporting our staff to develop the practical and technical skills required for digital education design and delivery, and to deliver an exceptional learning and teaching experience. In parallel, we will support our students to develop their digital skills so that they can fully engage with their learning and are better equipped for their careers.
Our strategic aims
Strategic aim 1.1: Developing Skills & Knowledge through our Partnerships
Our thriving student community develops broader employability, enterprise and interpersonal skills in addition to discipline-specific expertise. This is enhanced through our connected learning environment and outstanding and unparalleled partnerships with business, industry, public and third sectors.
We will achieve this by:
- providing excellent learning and teaching informed by cutting-edge research and relevant employer input. This will develop graduates who are distinctive due to their knowledge, skills, attitudes, and ambition, and who develop their careers and engage productively and innovatively with societal challenges in dynamic workplaces. This includes placing education for sustainable development at the heart of our programmes, enabling our students to contribute to addressing global challenges set out in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
- providing distinctive Strathclyde experiences that enable our students to benefit from a wide range of opportunities to enhance their experience of curricular and extracurricular opportunities. This deploys our extensive external partnerships and collaborative networks to create and provide opportunities for our students to undertake experiential learning, work placements, internships and work-based projects with industry, business, public and third sector partners, including experiences through international activity and student societies. This means they work on real problems and engage with clients and stakeholders to successfully resolve these
- enabling and developing our inspiring staff to adopt and use innovative and entrepreneurial approaches to enrich our students’ learning and skills. This includes expanding participation in our Strathclyde Inspire programme to encourage students and staff to develop an innovative entrepreneurial mind-set that informs their approach to study and work throughout their professional journey
Strategic aim 1.2: Widening access & participation
We are committed to boosting our support of widening access, participation, inclusion and diversity, being sector leading amongst research-intensive universities. We do this by developing and supporting our students from all backgrounds to realise their potential through the education and student experience we provide across all levels of study.
We will achieve this by:
- further enhancing our commitment to widening participation and inclusion across the University, selecting, developing and supporting students based on merit, potential and ability to benefit from the education we offer, and ensuring that our portfolio and approach remains innovative and socially progressive. We ensure a wider group can access our learning community through offering flexible opportunities in a range of different formats and using a variety of different tools, methods and approaches
- working in close partnership with schools, colleges and employers to promote access for a diverse range of learners to benefit from the life changing opportunity of a Strathclyde education. Our Young Strathclyder programme exemplifies this approach, offering practical educational opportunities and inspiring both primary and secondary school age pupils to want to undertake university study with us
- enriching and supporting our global student community so that the distinctive Strathclyde approach benefits communities internationally through our graduates. We also enable our overseas partners to engage meaningfully with our Scottish-based staff and students
- ensuring our processes, policies and approaches to teaching and student welfare are inclusive and responsive to the needs of our students, notably those from under-represented or vulnerable groups, recognising the intersection of multiple factors. We are committed to challenging and deconstructing racism and all forms of discrimination
Strategic aim 1.3: Outstanding Student Experience & Innovative Programmes
Our students benefit from an outstanding education experience, which is adaptive to the dynamic external environment, provides flexibility in pace, place and mode of learning, and is underpinned by a high quality, resilient, agile, flexible and supportive learning infrastructure.
We will achieve this by:
- working in close partnership with Strath Union and student representatives to continue to provide student support that focuses on health, wellbeing and inclusion in parallel with academic development, progression and attainment. This includes active health and social opportunities through sports clubs and student societies. This creates a learning and wider student experience that is vibrant, distinctive and useful
- ensuring that all students have a safe and secure experience on our campus and programmes, and remain mindful of our respectful and inclusive culture and the wellbeing responsibilities we have to others in our Strathclyde Community, for example building awareness of racism reporting processes
- investing in the digital student experience and enhancing teaching, learning, assessment, and the wider student experience through developing our digital systems and assets. This includes creating online access to support services, developmental opportunities, and social spaces for our learning communities. Our students have free access to the software needed for their courses and our digital inclusion programme provides free laptops and wifi to those most in need
- expanding our provision of diverse learner journeys, through lifelong learning opportunities, online and blended approaches, and by providing opportunities that are flexible in pace, place and mode of learning. This includes continuing professional development (CPD), a portfolio of online learning and upskilling offerings, and ensuring that these support our distinctive mission of useful learning, whether work-based, on-campus or online
- through our sector-leading Entrepreneurship for All programme, we will offer opportunities to all our students (as well as staff and alumni) to develop an entrepreneurial mindset. This encourages a passion for problem-solving, inspiration to instigate change and create impact and acting on opportunities