Principal's Report
For the year ended 31 July 2024
Having delivered a modest surplus in the 2022/23 financial year, we have been pleased to again deliver a surplus before exceptional items at the end of 2023/24, after another turbulent year for the higher education sector.
This last year has seen immigration policy and policy debates impacting on international student recruitment, particularly in the run up to the general election; a very tough SFC funding announcement for the Scottish higher education sector; a plethora of national strategies relevant to higher education at varying degrees of implementation; continued geopolitical ructions; and a new UK government.
The overall number of on-campus fee-paying students at QMU fell 7.4% on the previous year reflecting a sector-wide drop from the peak numbers reached during the pandemic when admission rates were inflated by policy decisions to respond to the pandemic. A decrease in the number of EU undergraduate students due to the consequences of Brexit was also a factor. While we saw a small decline in the number of postgraduate international numbers, we continued to see improvements in international undergraduate numbers with 87 more such students in 2023/24 than in 2022/23, a 147% increase.
An early adopter of transnational education partnerships, we continue to grow our provision in this field, diversifying our income stream and aligned with our academic purpose. Our launch in 2022 of flexible, on-demand online master’s courses is also providing a valuable new income stream, alongside enabling more people to study with us wherever they are based in the world.
At our home campus, we are continuing to make sensible investments to ensure that we offer an attractive student experience. An important example of this is the ongoing re-development and transformation of our Learning Resource Centre and various teaching spaces, as part our Future Spaces project.
Another important development this year has been creation of our Outdoor Learning Hub and Discovery Trail, which, like so many of our projects, has been facilitated through partnership with external organisations. This new facility aims to improve understanding of outdoor learning amongst the teaching profession, whilst acting as an asset to our entire student and staff community and people living around our campus.
Construction of the Edinburgh Innovation Hub is well underway and due for completion in 2025. Enabled through funding from the Edinburgh and South-East Scotland City Region Deal, the hub is designed to become a nationally significant centre for innovation driven business growth and to create new high value employment. It is being delivered through a joint venture between QMU and East Lothian Council.
We have successfully upgraded to a new virtual learning environment for our students and are making good progress on our new Learning, Teaching and Assessment Strategy. Our evolving strategy is being informed by work of a group of Student Champions and takes full account of the importance of digital skills in both students and staff.
In the National Student Survey results released in July, the proportion of students who gave a positive answer mostly matched or exceeded last year’s results, and the University exceeded its benchmarks in nine of the 27 core questions. However, on several programmes, student satisfaction was below the benchmark, and in those areas we are producing tailored action plans to deliver improvements, with the objective of ensuring a consistent high-quality student experience across the institution.
In the course of this last year, we have won accolades including in the Herald Higher Education
Awards, the Whatuni Student Choice Awards and the Global Student Living Awards.
We are commencing preparations for REF 2029. As part of that, we have reviewed and re-launched our Research and Knowledge Exchange Centres with increased emphasis on inclusive economic growth and the wellbeing economy.
Research highlights from this year include QMU’s first successful application to the highly prestigious Scottish Enterprise High Growth Spin Out Programme for PALM-ALT, a novel ingredient developed by our food experts to replace palm fat in a wide variety of products across the bakery sector. This development could reduce dependency on environmentally damaging, palm-based ingredients and also led to an exciting new regional pilot collaboration with the University of Edinburgh to provide specialist expertise for the commercialisation of QMU research. Other highlights include extension of our Lydia Osteoporosis project and launch of the Toy Box Diversity Lab website of resources to enhance disability literacy. We launched a new QMU Entrepreneurial Sub Strategy and Action Plan with early success already achieved including two QMU projects reaching the finals of Converge - Scotland's acclaimed company creation and enterprise programme for the university sector. Furthermore, we won European funding in collaboration with Edinburgh Napier University and a consortium of universities across Europe, for Start for Future (SFF) a project to drive innovation in health, wellbeing, social care, and food and drink.
In this and every year, we are hugely grateful for the support of our Court members, and of our Chancellor, Dame Prue Leith, who steps down at the end of this year. In line with our commitment to diversity, this last year we successfully launched a board apprenticeship scheme, GIVE, to enrich the makeup of our Court.
Looking ahead to 24/25 onwards, and taking account of the extremely challenging financial context, we are working to ensure that our operations allow us to deliver a recurring surplus budget position. This will ensure that we remain financially sustainable and that we have the necessary resources to invest in our future.
We are doing this through our EVOLVE project, which is focused on getting the balance in our business model right and optimising our operating model. The project recognises that geopolitical, economic, technological and social factors mean that a lot has changed, and changed fast, in recent years; and that this is set to continue and will undoubtedly change the way that universities work in terms of structures, processes and roles. Along with the rest of the sector, we are going to have to find ways of achieving more at QMU without spending more, and indeed, by making cost savings where we can. This is what EVOLVE is designed to achieve. We have already started to deliver some positive change through EVOLVE; notably, we are on track to launch Uni-Fi, our new finance system, in January.
We look forward to the future with optimism, confident that that we are able to make the right choices to ensure that QMU continues to thrive and grow - helping to create a better society through education, research and innovation, and providing a supportive and creative learning environment in which students and staff thrive.
Sir Paul Grice, FRSE, FAcSS
Principal and Vice-Chancellor
20 December 2024
