University of Warwick
Why we've signed the Manifesto
“The University of Warwick has signed the NCCPE Manifesto because engaging with the wider world is what we do at Warwick. It’s at the core of our philosophy and our mindset. In particular, we see public engagement as a crucial enabler of our University 2030 Strategy. Public engagement helps us play a regional and national leadership role as a modern university. For us this means working with local communities to make a positive impact on people and places. It helps us innovate through the exchange of ideas between the university, business and wider society to enrich learning and innovation. Our work in public engagement also drives us to work inclusively, making sure that a much wider range of people take part in public discussion, knowledge curation and the generation of new, collaborative research. It also enhances the teaching experience we offer Warwick students, as well as contributing towards the development of new skills and greater employability. And, of course, it informs our research through collaboration and co-production, leading to more impactful research, and it gives us a genuine platform from which to play our part even more strongly in national and international debate, social, economic and policy development.”
Prof Stuart Croft, Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Warwick
Our approach to public engagement
Warwick is a university that strives to be exceptional in everything we do. Our 2030 Strategic core purposes of Research and Education, as well as our strategic priorities of Innovation, Inclusion, Internationalisation Sustainability and Regional Leadership, all focus around this commitment to excellence, and engagement is seen as a vital strand that weaves through and enables all aspects of this strategy.
In the Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF) 2021 and 2024 reports we were delighted that Warwick was recognised for this commitment to engagement, and placed in the top 10% of English higher education institutes for “Public and community engagement”.
A distinctive strength of our university has always been our commitment to societal change and our relevance to the wider world, and particularly our close links with business and industry, but more recently we’ve taken huge strides to ensure we are equally committed to how we engage with the public and members of our local communities. Coming off the back of our learning as a RCUK Catalyst Seed Funded Institution in 2015-2017, our role as hosts of the British Science Festival in 2019 and being a principal partner in Coventry City of Culture 2021-22, the university launched the Warwick Institute of Engagement (WIE) in November 2020. WIE was created to capitalise on our commitment to engagement and its role in meeting our 2030 goals. It does this both by working to improve how the University involves community groups and individuals in our pursuit of knowledge and understanding, and by improving the ways the university communicates about its research to these groups. In so doing, WIE enables the university to engage more profoundly and sustainably locally, regionally, nationally and globally.
One of the key strengths of WIE is its dual leadership and structure. The institute has both an Academic Director and a Professional Services Director and combines professional services staff from the university’s previous public engagement team with academic colleagues from each of Warwick’s faculties within its core team. In addition, WIE has also recruited members of the university’s professional services and academic staff, as well as crucially UG and PG students, as Fellows of the Institute, who participate in a number of learning circles run by the Fellows focused on different aspects of public engagement. This approach brings together practical and theoretical engagement know-how with new insights and specialist expertise to generate best practice. At the same time, the Institute’s structure allows a deeper reach across all the University’s faculties and departments enabling stronger partnerships and collaborations. We also have a cohort of Regional Fellows composed of people who play important community roles within our region and who can contribute to the development of WIE public engagement strategy to ensure that the university continues to be as active a community partner as it can be.
Now in our fourth year, WIE has expanded its student engagement activities, supporting engagement internships and URSS projects as well as the MASc in Community, Engagement and Belonging, and grown our Fellowship to 180 staff and students from across the institution. These have enabled our public events programme to become firmly fixed in the calendar with recognised ‘brands’ such as Resonate Lates, the Resonate Festival of Science and Technology, our new Resonate Festival of Arts and Culture and our ongoing collaboration on the ESRC Festival of Social Science. These popular public engagement events have created a showcase of Warwick’s world-class research for local audiences and provided a plethora of opportunities for the public to get involved in all that we do here in the university. We also continue to support collaborative work with communities close to campus and all around the world though our Collaboration and Co-Production Fund. We strive to develop new ways to broaden understanding among our staff, students and our wider communities of what public engagement is and all the exciting things it enables.
Contact
Name: Helen Wheatley
Title: Academic Director – Warwick Institute of Engagement
Email: wie@warwick.ac.uk