UCL's New Five-Year Strategy: An Interview With VP of Strategy Paul Clark

Pi Online Co-Editor in Chief Aidan Dennehy sat down with UCL’s Vice President of Strategy Paul Clark to discuss their newly released Draft Strategic Plan. Clark played a key role in the plans development and will work to implement it following the plans confirmation.

First page of UCL’s 2022-27 Draft Strategic Plan

Last Monday, UCL released its 2022-2027 Draft Strategic Plan. The plan, accessible here, laid out UCL’s priorities over the next five years. The Draft Strategic Plan was developed after a consultation period which began in October 2021. Discussion papers were created during the consultation period which proposed priorities and potential methods of addressing. After a series of town halls, student consultation events, and feedback submissions, the plan was published and a period of discussion and feedback began and will last until November 18th. The Draft Strategic Plan will be confirmed at the end of this phase which lasts through December.

To make your voice heard, please attend the Strategic Plan town hall on Thursday, November 10th.

The following is an interview with Vice President of Strategy Paul Clark. Clark assumed this new role in March of this year where he worked closely with President and Provost Dr Michael Spence to develop, and will later implement, UCL’s new Strategic Plan. Clark served as the Chief Executive of the Higher Education Statistics Agency and has held senior management positions in a number of universities.

Q: Can you start off by giving a brief background of how this plan came to be and some background on the 20 year UCL Strategic Plan implemented in 2014?

A: Sure, so the first thing to say about the strategic plan is that we’re trying to do a number of things with it. We want to recognise that we are an ambitious, innovative, global university. We have a high degree of academic excellence and we want to maintain that and build on that, improve it. That's the overriding aspiration. 

At the same time we recognise that we are in a particular point in time, a particular economic circumstance, particular sort of geo-political and domestic circumstances. We have to acknowledge those and take them on board, and think about how we’re going to deal with those ambitions in this context.

You’re right, there is the kind of wider context of UCL 2034 that predates this process by quite some time. In essence, that sets the strategic framework. Overall across these areas we want to be excellent at these things and recognised for our research, innovation, impact, education. The draft trategic plan sort of takes those aspirations and says for this particular period of time, the next five years, these are the things we’re going to focus on. This is where we’re going to prioritise and allocate our time in order to take on board both the circumstance that we’re in but also what our longer term aspirations are.

Q: To my understanding the plan had a bit of a delay initially, which may have been because some stakeholders didn’t feel that they were fully included in its development. Can you talk about what you’ve done since to incorporate the faculty, students, employees?

A: Yeah I mean there's been a huge amount of engagement over a period of twelve months and that's not something that's going to stop at the end of this year when the plans published, its something we plan to continue. There's a lot of information that’s contained in the companion report that we published alongside the strategic plan setting out exactly how we have consulted. Just the sheer number of engagements that we’ve had, I think there's been something like 5,500 separate views of the papers

Q: I know the plan discusses a set of four values that it wants to uplift: integrity, mutual accountability, openness and inclusion, care and respect, and rigour and innovation. So can you talk a little about why you chose these and discuss some examples of how they were applied in this plan?

A: Yeah, sure. So I’ll go back to something I said at the start which is that UCL is not just any university. It is clearly a globally leading academically excellent university based in a fantastic city. But it also, since its foundation, has had a very strong set of values, a very strong ethos which runs through everything we do so it was really important that these were not quite kind of re-articulated, but sort affirmed and discussed and considered as being a really integral part of strategy development. So that's where that thought came to do that.

Thinking about how they impact in on the strategic plan itself. Well, they provide the foundation. They're very much something that we want to make sure that are living and breathing and we can hold each other to account for as part of the wider community. They’re almost kind of touchstones which we’ll use to check in and say, are these activities, priorities, and plans, are they meeting our values.

It did generate a good level of discussion and debate in the community when we published this paper that was a kind of strong support for this. But the very fact that this is a values driven institution, I think makes it one of the most significant features.

Q: So starting with the academic side of the plan, you first identify a set of five grand challenges that you set up a framework with which to tackle, those being climate, mental health, data empowered societies, inequalities, and intercultural communication. Can you tell us what a “grand challenge” and discuss the Grand Challenges Program?

A: First of all, I think this point applies to this area as it does to the values and other areas. These are not my challenges or my values, they are UCL parties, and they've been tested and discussed and considered and communicated with the whole community. So a strong part of what we're seeing with this strategic plan in general is that community input builds consensus arounds some challenges and in some areas. And we responded to that. You can see that in the plan how we've sought to respond to music coming back from the community.

I think there are a number of things that we're seeking to do. We sought to identify  what are the kind of societal challenges that the community feels are most pressing, most urgent combined with, well, okay, where does UCL work best? Can UCL optimise its considerable strengths and resources to make an impact on addressing these challenges?

You can imagine potentially this is not an exhaustive list of what those challenges might be. So it's trying seek that balance between where impact is needed and where UCL can really make that impact. And then thinking a little bit more internally where does some of this activity need to be fragmented? So what can we do internally to really join up groups and join up activities right across the university so that we are kind of maximising our resources while maximising our input to do what you UCL has always sought to do which effectively make the world better, make society better.

Q: So how much in terms of actual money and resources will be allocated towards these Grand Challenges?

A: In parallel with the strategic plan, we're developing a financial strategy and estate strategy. And they'll be published alongside the strategic plan towards the end of this year, beginning of next calendar year. And that will kind of contain information around the costs and the funding that's going to be allocated to each area.

The plan notes that a consultation paper “suggested this would be in the region of £1m per challenge per year over five years”

Q: Each Grand Challenge will have a dedicated academic lead. What will that role look like and how will they be able to shape it?

A: So I think at a high level, I would go back to the answer, well what are we trying to achieve with these challenges? Well, okay, we want to make real world impact. We want to mobilise our resources, we want to defragment activity across UCL. So to make sure we are maximising efforts in these areas both across research, education, and operations. We want to make sure that activity is driven, as it is at the moment, through faculties and departments. So it's not kind of additive and it builds on those foundations. At the kind of top level, what we would be looking for is some leadership.

UCL is a very decentralised and democratic organisation so it will take the combined aggregate efforts of lots of people to in order to deliver change in these areas. We’re not attempting to describe the totality of UCL’s academic activity through these challenges. There’s a huge amount of foundational academic activity that takes place across a wide range of disciplines. This is not intended to draw away from that, but to build on it.

Q: The draft strategic plan speaks a lot about future-proofing UCL in different areas, specifically in the teaching and assessment framework. It specifically discusses giving students a basic level of education on topics like sustainability, data science, and carbon reduction. What would that look like in practice?

A: This is an example of the Grand Challenges type approach. We want to make sure that as many of our students as possible have an opportunity to study modules that are in those areas. We can continue to foster a distinctive UCL education that's really kind of equipping graduates for the kind of labor market, the world of work, but also for the kind of societal and the global challenges that they're going to face in the future.

I think figuring out what the best ways for this to happen will need to be a process of further discussion, dialogue, and engagement between our students and the relevant staff as we go forward.

Q:Another change impacting students is the plan to revise the academic calendar by 2026/27. What are some of the kind of changes that were suggested or what could the new academic year look like?

A: The plan is not seeking to prejudge the outcomes or be prescriptive. I think in the relevant discussion papers, there was a consensus that this is something that does need to be looked at. It going to follow a process of discussion, engagement, and design iteration as we go forward over the next five years.

Q: Speaking of consensus, what changes do you think were called for the most during the engagement process?

A: I would go back to just to say again that there's a very, very strong commitment to UCL and what it does. As a university across the staff and student community are really ambitious, really innovative, really entrepreneurial. They have fantastic world changing ideas that they put forward very, very regularly. It's kind of key strength of the organization. That level of ambition is what we're trying to maintain, we want to keep that very strong kind of consensus around that as you can imagine.

We're in a high cost, high inflation environment with a lot of uncertainty around. It’s not always the most facilitative operating environment. There's probably some fundamental things that need to be fixed. So where do we prioritise our activities and our resources? So there are some consensus around that. You can see that in the plan itself, some of the areas of focus that come in, and the more fundamental parts later on in the plan.

Q: Another aspect of the plan was the Student Life Strategy. So can you give us an overview of that and what students should expect from it?

A: This is something that’s being developed jointly with the Students Union. UCL is a very substantial complex organisation and then we have a strategic plan and there are a number of facilitating and supporting strategies sitting around it, of which student life one is clearly one of the most important. It’s really looking at, well, how can we maximise the support we provide for students, but also some of the kind of extracurricular opportunities that sit around that sport, the arts, volunteering, access to career development opportunities and activities as well. So trying to cover those sorts of areas.

Q: Littered throughout the strategic plan is the idea of reducing inefficiency and bureaucracy, as you already mentioned UCL is a massive and complex organisation. As of 2021 there were 4,900 administrative and managerial staff and funding for them increased 27% between 2012 and 2019. If the plan is successful, should we expect continued growth at that rate?

A: I think first of all, overall as proportion of our spend, our spend on central areas is actually decreasing as proportional overall spend. It's not the case that these things are grown in the way that kind of statistic might suggest. The outcomes that UCL delivers or seeks to deliver are in the areas of research, innovation, education, and employability. How it does that and the resources it has available to do that is a function of the where it is at a particular point in time and the kind of particular stresses and challenges that it faces. So I would say that looking towards 2027, we would want to be measured on those kind of activities. Have we done what we said we want to do in terms of our research? Have we done what we said we want to do in terms of our student experience? Have we done what we said we want to do in terms of our financial resilience and improving workloads and inefficiency? So those are the kinds of things that I think we want to look at in terms of measuring success.

Q: The plan also discusses implementing a new framework for assessing which projects and buildings are focused on and built and how they’re prioritised. Can you talk about how this new framework will work and how it is supposed to be more transparent?

A: The starting point for this is again that UCL is serially innovative and entrepreneurial organisation. The challenge is not generating ideas. And that's true of the staff, true of the students, and that is a fantastic position to be in. However, and there is a however, our resources are not limitless and particularly at the moment we're not alone in this. Pretty much every university in the country is facing, and many of the organisations are facing, similar challenges. We have to ask ourselves questions about, okay, what do we want to focus on? What do we want to prioritise? But we need to do that in a way that brings in as much of the community as we can in that decision making.

I think it was Paper four which set out some proposals around how this system could work. And we got a very strong response that actually the students need to be part of this decision making process. So we've taken that aboard, it’s something that we responded to. So we will now involve students and student representatives at the various kind of decision making levels for those kinds of really long term investment decisions and investment priorities

Q: UCL obviously generates a portion of its income from fees, both from home students and from overseas ones. And the number of students at UCL has increased by more than double in the last 12 years. I know the plan would like to see it increase slightly more: up to 47,000 full-time students. So how do you respond to critics who would say that UCL is expanding simply to generate more money?

A: UCL is one of the largest, if not the largest, university by student population in this country. That is a huge strength because it means that many more students can benefit from the very distinctive UCL education. They can be part of the UCL community, they can engage with the research, innovation, the impact, the education that exists here. And then that very large number of students can go on to become graduates in the workforce, leaders in their own areas, change makers, and part of the global alumni community. And we think that for UCL, for its its global region, global ambitions, that's where we position ourselves. It’s is a very positive thing to have that very large student and graduate community.

Q: And do you think that expansion can be done while maintaining the academic rigour and admissions requirements that UCL has had up to this point?

A: Do I think it can be done? Yes, without question. And looking at the plan as a whole, not breaking it down into components, it is intended to achieve that aim. So those who read it and engage with it as you already have will see that yes, we have aspirations around our Grand Challenges and around the future of education, but we also recognise that there's some pressures that we need to deal with and there's some fundamental things we want to focus on and address. These things are not indivisible. So in order to meet our long term academic research education aspirations, we recognise that we're operating in a particular time or so we need to fix some of these fundamentals in order to sustain that: both the excellence of our research and the high quality of our student experience.

Q: Obviously that number of students requires a lot of organisation, especially around timetabling which the plan calls ton to be changed. What were some of the ideas discussed as to how a new timetabling system would look?

A: I can’t speak in detail to the what the options for changing the timetable were. But what I will say is that, again, this will be done by a process of engagement with our community of staff and students. We’ll take a look at some of our systems and some of the pressures on the system.

This was an area where I think there was a consensus. We really need to take a very long, hard look at this and make sure that we can deliver, and continue to deliver the kind of really high quality service that we want without putting too much pressure on anyone within the university.

Q: Such a diverse community brings a variety of opinions and definitions of what free speech looks like. The plan kind of reaffirms UCL’s dedication to free speech, within some boundaries, which the plan calls for discussion around. It suggests that there will be opportunities created for the community to discuss what those boundaries will look like over the coming years, what do you think those spaces would look like?

A: I think this is another area where we establish an aspiration based on the principles which are set by the strong view of our community. You note the strong views of the community, it's very much a live issue externally as we know.

Maintaining that foundational value of preserving freedom of speech and academic freedom, is absolutely fundamental. Finding the ways in which that is best done, best discharged I think is going to be another process. A process of dialogue as we go forward over the next five years.

Q: The plan sets out a variety of goals and aspirations that it hopes UCL achieves over the next five years. Can you talk about the Key Performance Indicators and how they will be used to track the success of the strategic plan?

A: So this is another area where I think we can see some of the principles and values that are hopefully overt throughout the plan come to the fore because we want to know how we're doing in terms of the delivery of the plan. It's not so much do we want to know how each individual project is doing, but actually are we broadly delivering the outcomes that we want to deliver as a university and a world leading institution? We're still in draft, still working through what are the best things that are going to allow us as a community to be able to decide that. But we also want to make sure that these are there's openness and transparency around this as well.

So that again, the whole community can have access to the information they can use and they can see it. Recognising more that we're setting off on a sort of five year journey. But if the past five years is anything to go by, we're going to need to have some flexibility, and some adaptation. So we want to make sure that we can take account of that and so we'll not be too rigid about it and build some of that in it because inevitably things are going to change. We need to be able to respond to that.

Q: If you were to summarise what the main takeaways of the draft strategic plan are for students, what would that be?

A: So how will it change things for students? Well first of all, I would just say there's nothing really that's off limits in terms of student engagement, and that's certainly been true of our engagement up to this point. I would say we want to make sure that the understanding how to navigate through the curriculum is easier, it’s more straightforward, it's more legible. That there's access to assessment of feedback, appropriate points that it's possible to access the sort of modules that we want to see on engagement with the kind of grand challenges we want to see. And also that we live up to the aspirations that we developed jointly with the student union around student life. So whether it is sport or arts or volunteering or creative, whatever kind other opportunities are that we are making more of those opportunities more easily accessible and available and navigable to our students. And clearly we want to make sure that we retain a really outstanding world-leading education and experience for our students so that they are equipped to transition effectively into jobs and careers, some of which we don't yet know what they are.

Q: Why should students continue to engage with what’s left of the consultation?

A: We’ve got a particular consultation window on this plan now, which ends in about two and a half weeks time, not very long. Now is a fantastic opportunity to influence the contents, it is in a very formative stage. So I think this is a fantastic opportunity, but I would say it's not the only opportunity because as we move forward, as we get into 2023, there's going to be plenty of others. These initiatives will help shape what you see is going to look like in the key areas by 2027.

Engage now so we can set the kind of the framework and baseline for that, but also please encourage your colleagues, constituents, and groups to continue to engage. We will make obviously every effort to do that, don't see it as a now or never. We want to make sure that these really quite significant changes are co-created and co-developed with our student community.