Public and Community Engagement: The State of the Sector

Over the last twenty years, public engagement has moved from the margins of university life into its core. It is embedded in national accountability frameworks such as the Research Excellence Framework (REF), institutional strategies and professional roles. A generation of engagement and inclusion professionals has emerged, skilled in navigating complexity, sustaining long-term relationships connecting meaningfully with communities across the UK. Almost every institution in our sample articulates a civic mission. That progress is real, and it matters.

But the evidence also reveals a more troubling, cumulative pattern. We are calling it the drift: this is not a loss of commitment, but the cumulative effect of decisions made under pressure, in challenging economic times. Incremental changes. Funding shortened. Teams lost. The conditions that make engagement durable are being quietly eroded, not through intention, but through the weight of accumulated constraint.

At precisely the moment public trust matters most, the infrastructure that builds it is under pressure. The risks are real: losing relational capacity that will take years to rebuild; relationships turning transactional; public trust further eroding; the value of engagement becoming less visible to those who most need to understand it; and inequities remaining unaddressed.

Alongside the report, we published a set of recommendations for anyone with a vested interest in the future of our higher education system: funders, university leaders, engagement professionals, academics and researchers, government and policymakers, and the NCCPE itself.