New challenges, new solutions
Advance HE is dedicated to supporting the development of our members based on sector needs, and provides funding to help enable this. Previously, funding had been in the form of our Small Development Projects (SDPs), which were launched in 2004 and more recently, our Good Practice Grants.
For the 2020-21 member benefit year, funding will be available to our global membership base in the form of our Collaborative Development Fund, which aims to harness the knowledge, experience and innovative capabilities of our members in order to address current challenges within the HE sector.
We invited our colleagues at member institutions to apply for the funding of between £20,000 and £35,000 per project, with projects starting in February 2021.
Below you can find information on the three projects as part of the 2020-21 Collaborative Development Fund.
Member benefits 2020-21
Advance HE membership packages feature a range of benefits including the Connect Benefit Series and access to the Collaborative Development Fund.
Board Diversity Practice Project
This project aims to collate, understand and share members’ practice to deliver on board diversity via the sharing of practice and lessons learned from members’ attempts to diversify their boards. This will provide an evidence base for members, potential solutions through an easily-accessible bank of case-studies, and identification of priorities for areas still to address.
Developing flexible ecosystems for education that support student success: where are we now, what works and where next?
This project aims to review the higher education sector’s capacity for flexible provision to identify exemplars of the requisite infrastructure, strategies and enabling technologies that support equitable transitions through learning and work and identify priority areas to be addressed by Advance HE or providers.
The reshaping of higher education and research institute strategy and culture: pandemic perturbations, evolution or revolution?
The central question for this generative project will be ‘how have the strategies of higher education institutions and research institutes changed as a result of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic?’ The inquiry/research goal will be to review the range of radical changes to institutional strategies (and strategic thinking) brought about so far by the pandemic, and hand-in-hand with this the transformation of organisational cultures.
