Report launch event - Public and Community Engagement: The State of the Sector
We have a new report coming.
On 22nd October, we are publishing Public and Community Engagement: The State of the Sector, our first national snapshot on public engagement and engaged research in UK higher education. The report draws on desk research across 24 UK universities and interviews with 16 key people in the sector, with data gathered primarily in the second half of 2025. Findings provide a meaningful context to NCCPE’s work to imagine inclusive and engaged futures for UK higher education. The picture it presents is both encouraging and sobering.
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.
Naming and evidencing the drift is a first step. Deciding what to do about it is the next - and that's the work of Engaged Futures - building a vision for how higher education could be working, supported and connected to social value by 2045. As policymakers place greater emphasis on devolution and place-based approaches to addressing complex societal challenges, the importance of building strong partnerships between universities, communities and local stakeholders has come into even sharper focus.
Alongside the report, we are publishing 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. No single actor can hold this ground alone. The question is not what someone else should do. It is what each of us, in our own part of the system, can do.
Join us to discuss the report and what we can all do at our report launch webinar on Thurs 22nd October at 2.30pm.
