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The reshaping of higher education and research institute strategy and culture

Pandemic perturbations, evolution or revolution?

Advance HE Collaborative Development Fund

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.

Advance HE will lead on this project. Further updates will become available in due course.

The Collaborative Development Fund is an Advance HE member benefit and is open to colleagues at Advance HE member institutions. 

Find out more about Advance HE membership

The reshaping of higher education and research institute strategy and culture: pandemic perturbations, evolution or revolution?

Whilst in some respects the pace of change has been seen as accelerating innovation, particularly in the field of on-line and blended learning, there are many other areas where the impact and ramifications of changes are far from understood. Working from home, disconnected teams, the emphasis on teaching over research, turbulent student recruitment, the loss of international, new dynamics in the relationships with local partners and communities, high levels of staff stress, issues of isolation and inclusion, new technologies for communication, and significantly reset and recast leadership challenges. All of this will have influenced the framing and reframing of institutional strategies, and alongside this the transformation of culture.

Advance HE invites applications for a  project entitled ‘The reshaping of Higher Education and Research Institute strategy and culture: pandemic perturbations, evolution or revolution?’. The central question for this  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. What is transient, what is transformational and what is existential? This will include considering the role of transformational approaches to leadership, particularly various forms of engaging and shared leadership.

Additional projects

As part of our Collaborative Development Fund, during the 2020-21 membership year, we are also running two additional projects:

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.

Find out more
Developing Flexible Ecosytems Project

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.

The Board Diversity Practice Project is running in collaboration with the international executive search firm Perrett Laver, whose involvement has enabled us to widen the scope of the research and maximise its benefit to Advance HE members and the sector.

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Perrett Laver