Corporate Plan 2006 - 2012:
A Statement of Strategic Intent

Supporting the Vision

Staffing

We will establish BU as an employer of choice by recruiting and retaining excellent staff. We take pride in our committed, creative and professional staff who will continue to be our key resource as the University benefits from their wide-ranging academic and career backgrounds.

Our academics will inspire students with the excitement and enthusiasm of their professional activities and enable students to learn from those who are themselves learning. They will give papers at conferences, win research grants and contracts, secure other forms of external funding, supervise PhD students, engage in professional practice, consult, start companies and publish.

They will work in a competitive externally-facing environment and be well-known nationally and internationally.

Estates

We will continue to refurbish and modernise our existing building stock to optimise its academic use, facilitate interaction between staff and students and further demonstrate our commitment to the development of our two environmentally-sustainable campuses.

The next six years will be characterised by the most intense period of building activity the University has known. By 2012 we will have rationalised on academic grounds the use of our two campuses; we will have refurbished much of our current space and have built, or be in the process of building, substantial new academic buildings.

We will work with partners to build high quality student accommodation in Bournemouth and Poole.

Marketing

A strengthened marketing function will project our message clearly and confidently to our target audiences, locally, nationally and globally. Our image will be determined by the things that make us special and these will be found primarily, although not exclusively, in our focused centres of academic excellence.

Our corporate communications will focus on links to the professions, employability, centres of academic excellence, the student experience, the appeal of joining our University to ‘Be You’ and the virtues of an academic over a teaching environment. These communications will, in their proportion and tone, acknowledge that academic achievement is at the pinnacle of our esteem.

Corporate and Management Information

We will develop our corporate information function alongside our planning function to ensure that corporate information is accurate, timely, relevant, spans all of our activities and supports our Strategic Plan.

We are seen by the outside world through our returns to various government and non-government agencies. We will put procedures in place to ensure that all such data are reviewed for appropriateness, quality and completeness prior to release.

Finance

We will adopt a rigorous approach to the management of our finances which will be underpinned by two robust financial models: a whole-University model for use in the evaluation of institutional options; and an internal and transparent resource allocation model (TRAM).

We will review all developments and initiatives (both investments and disinvestments) on the basis of their alignment with our Strategic Plan. We will further strengthen the University’s management of risk.

We will, with external support, expand our Development Office and invest in ongoing ‘friend-raising’ coupled with targeted ‘fundraising’. Finally and fundamentally, we will, through increased income from tuition fees, unregulated fees, research and other income, decrease further our reliance on public funds.