Engaged Futures - Pathways to an engaged future for higher education
If universities were operating in a deeply engaged way, how would they be organised and led, and how would their core work – building and sharing knowledge – be understood and practiced?
The NCCPE launched Engaged Futures to build a vision for how universities might be working in 2045 and establish actions to help us realise these futures. We are inviting anyone with an interest in establishing new futures for higher education to join us.
Why now?
There has never been a more urgent need for this kind of radical thinking.
It is hard not to feel overwhelmed by the threats we face: financial challenges, diminishing political support, and lukewarm public attitudes. Nor does there appear to be any clear pathway forward, other than retrenchment and downscaling.
Engaged Futures provides an important opportunity to step back from the pressures that make the present moment so hard to navigate and to take a long-term view, to embrace transformational thinking to build a new narrative and sense of collective purpose.
Why us?
The NCCPE has always put the public role of the university at the centre of our work: how can we organise ourselves to create the greatest possible value for society?
As a centre, we have worked hard for 15 years to support our funders’ ambition to nurture a more deeply engaged and connected sector. We’ve been lucky enough to work alongside brilliant individuals, and committed institutions, who have been grappling with how to build engagement into the DNA of their organisations.
Progress has been steady, but change is a long process. Change has been incremental, many small steps – and sometimes steps backwards as universities re-adjust their priorities. Interventions like the REF (and the idea of engagement acting as a pathway to impact) have helped to focus attention. And we rarely meet anyone who works in a university who doesn’t believe in their public service mission and who are motivated by ‘making a difference’. But when we compare how HEIs are organised now with how they were organised 15 years ago – how much has really changed? How close are we to being a fully engaged and inclusive sector?
Scaffolding thought and action
Words like ‘transformation’ are ‘existential crisis’ trip off the tongue – but risk trivialising the profound collective challenge we now face. They must be backed up by a resolute and robust approach to sense making and action planning to enable us to plot a course forward.
It’s for this reason that we are building the Engaged Futures programme around a tried and tested methodology for navigating profound systems-level disruption. We are drawing on the Three Horizon methodology
The stakes have never been higher for the HE sector. Engagement means being perennially curious about your place in the world, taking responsibility for your actions and never taking for granted the value you are contributing to society. That is the spirit that animates Engaged Futures. Join us!
Engaged Futures Group Members
As well as our growing group of catalysts, we are working with a smaller, diverse group of individuals with deep knowledge about the sector, the Engaged Futures group. This group will meet at each phase of the Engaged Futures process to help seed, deepen, sense-check and challenge the collective thinking that we do as catalysts.
