The Civic University Network

The Civic University Network builds on the 2018 UPP Foundation Civic University Commission which challenged universities to re-shape their role and responsibility to their communities to realise their potential as drivers of a new civic agenda. Our vision for the Civic University Network is to help make this ambition a reality – supporting universities to develop and embed civic aspirations at an institutional level, as well as working with government and strategic partners to ensure that a university’s geographic role and responsibility is used more effectively as an agent to drive positive societal change.

Our Focus

The Network will work to support the growing Civic University movement by sharing best practice between participating universities, support those HEIs who are developing Civic University Agreements (a key recommendation of the UPP Commission), develop a peer review scheme so that universities increase their civic impact, and connect universities with other sectors which are prioritising issues around ‘place’ to level up the economy and society. The civic university network is funded by the UPP foundation, Department for Education, Carnegie UK Trust and Arts Council England.

View All The Latest News

Our Ambition

The Civic University Commission challenged universities to re-shape their roles and responsibility’s to their communities to realise their potential as drivers of a new civic agenda. Our vision for the Civic University Network is to help make this ambition a reality – supporting universities to develop and embed civic aspirations at an institutional level, as well as working with government and strategic partners to ensure that a university’s geographic role and responsibility is used more effectively as an agent to drive positive societal change.

Civic Insights

Civic Insights provide perspectives and ideas, written by leaders in education, government and beyond, who are interested in ways to harness the civic mission of universities for positive social change. They aim to provide unique insights and inform thinking, drawing on the direct experience of those navigating today’s civic policy challenges, opportunities and practices, in order to help shape the development and deployment of civic-focused strategies within HE institutions

The first in our Civic Insights series is from Chris Millward, Director for Fair Access and Participation at the Office for Student who discusses improving local prosperity and the big challenges facing HE in 2021

Current Context

The establishment of the network comes as we all grapple with the challenges of Covid-19, not only for our institutions, but also for our wider communities and localities. The unprecedented nature and scale of this will shape the civic agenda for the foreseeable future. The Network will be working with Universities UK, the NHS Confederation and other key sector bodies to develop a coordinated response to the challenges ahead and to support universities’ contribution to longer-term recovery from the impact of Covid-19. The thought piece prepared by Des McNulty and John Goddard is well worth a read. One of the activities of the network will be to facilitate discussions across universities on the issues raised in the paper

DOWNLOAD document