Strategic plan 2021-2026

A plan for sustainable and transformative change.

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Vision

Our Vision is to be a university that is globally significant - a sector leader and innovator that delivers the highest quality research, teaching and student experience, and that engages locally, nationally, and internationally.

Students sit in rows in a lecture theatre and pay attention.

Purpose

Our Purpose is to advance knowledge, wisdom and understanding through the excellence of our teaching and research. By engaging with others, we will use our collective intellectual and wider capabilities as a force for good and create positive economic, cultural, societal and environmental change.

Values

In pursuit of our Vision and in keeping with our Purpose, we work to uphold our Values:

  • We respect each other by being open and fair and promoting diversity
  • We build strong communities by working effectively together in a supportive way
  • We create positive change by being ambitious in our learning, expertise and action.

Overarching goals

To maximise the transformative impact of all that we do we have identified three overarching goals that drive our strategy.

To be recognised as a global leader amongst universities

Our primary goal is to consolidate Lancaster University's status as a leading global research-intensive university. We define global leadership as being a "go to" university for research, teaching and engagement that is widely respected for its record of transforming lives, communities, practice and thinking in countries across the globe. We will measure this goal by making further progress towards a top 100 position in key global rankings of universities. Already ranked within the world top 100 on many objective measures, further developing our global visibility and reputation will be critical to achieving this aim.

To advance our strong national profile

We will seek to consolidate and sustain our position and profile as a leading UK university, delivering a high-quality education and wider student experience, stimulating and shaping the national higher education and research agendas, policy development and public thinking. We will be a source and a driver of new thinking and practice that improves communities, culture, society and the economy. We will measure this by monitoring our position in national rankings of UK higher education institutions.

Accelerate our transformative impact in the communities in which we operate

By focusing on high-value, high-impact projects that exploit our interdisciplinarity and our subject strengths across the institution, we will seek to increase our transformative impact on thinking and practice in the communities in which we operate. Working collaboratively with our partners for mutual benefit, we aim to have global impact across a range of communities encompassing disciplines, localities, regions, nations, policy, practice and thought. We will measure this via our performance in the UK's Knowledge Exchange Framework.

Living our values

These three exemplars indicate how, in core areas of strategic development, we will put our values to respect each other, build strong communities and create positive change at the heart of what we do.

Our strategic priorities

Our drivers

Our drivers identify six thematic, cross-cutting and high-priority activities that will enable and support the delivery of this strategy.

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