The University Vice Chancellor Debbie Prentice, with Lord Patrick Vallance and Minister Pennycook at this week’s Innovate Cambridge Summit
This week saw various significant announcements for and from the University of Cambridge, the Cambridge region and the wider so-called Ox-Cam Corridor. Starting with the last, £500M has been pledged for investment in new homes, infrastructure and business space by the Government for the Oxford to Cambridge Growth Corridor. Most of this money is coming to the Cambridge city region. Improving local infrastructure (housing, water and transport in particular) is vital if growth is to be possible. Those in the north of England may wonder why Cambridge is favoured but, as Minister Pennycook stated clearly at this week’s Innovate Cambridge Summit, the Government sees the Corridor as crucial in being able to stimulate the economy of the whole UK. Or, as Lord Vallance (also present this week) is quoted in the Government’s press release:
‘These investments are a milestone, not just for the Oxford to Cambridge Corridor, but for the entire country. We are going to deliver the housing, amenities and infrastructure that businesses need to grow and that people need to flourish. This region has all the ingredients to be the UK’s answer to Silicon Valley or the Boston Cluster: somewhere that turns world-class innovation into economic growth the whole nation benefits from.’
Within this new money, £15M has been put aside for an innovation hub to drive growth, alongside the necessary infrastructure. In terms of innovation, money was also committed earlier this summer to develop the Cambridge x Manchester Innovation Partnership – the first trans-UK innovation collaboration of its kind – funded with £4.8M from Research England, so that there is a direct connection between the Cambridge city region and Manchester, one vehicle to ensure the north of England does receive some benefit. Both the University of Cambridge and the University of Manchester are committing further funds of their own to this enterprise.
The Innovate Cambridge Summit covered these plans and much more. One key message that has sat at the heart of the work of Innovate Cambridge since its start is the importance of inclusion. That Cambridge is the most unequal city in the country was highlighted by many speakers during the day, with a call for action to make sure that innovation and growth benefit the whole community. The Cambridge Pledge, an initiative driven by Innovate Cambridge, is a shared commitment to channel wealth and innovation into lasting social good: companies that create wealth in the city through innovation are called upon to pledge some of their future profits.
For many Cambridge residents, the University may seem a remote, forbidding organisation not accessible to people ‘like them’, and who probably don’t expect the inequalities they face every day to go away any time soon. In an important new venture, the University is aiming to change both the perception and the reality for the whole community. The day before the Innovation Summit, the University had launched its Civic Framework, which is the outcome of a ‘listening exercise’ conducted over the past months. When asked to describe the University in three words, the most common words local residents used were historic, prestigious and excellence, but also and less attractively, elite. There was a range of other worryingly negative words such as arrogant, remote, exclusive and entitled. Nearly half the respondents felt the University did badly at communicating its research.
Under the banner People, Place, Partnership: Civic priorities for the University of Cambridge the University pledges to improve with four underpinning civic principles:
- Equity, inclusion and belonging;
- Collaboration and mutual benefit;
- Transparency and learning
- Sustainable impact
Of course the proof of the pudding will be in the delivery. In three years’ time, will local residents be more inclined to use words such as inclusive and transparent rather than exclusive and remote?
I have argued before (and also here and here) that universities have a responsibility for training youth who are not aiming at university, but perhaps at something technical and/or vocational. I am delighted to see that amongst the actions the University is proposing under its Civic Missions is one to develop skills including youth opportunities. Opening up its training programmes to more apprentices – whether they end up working in the University or elsewhere in the local innovation ecosystem – strikes me as a minimal action the University can take. Ensuring that T-Level students have the necessary placement is another ‘easy’ step. Academics and staff who have the charisma to inspire the young in the less advantaged areas around the city region, not just the city schools themselves, need to get out more to share their love for their discipline or work more generally. It is not sufficient to run a Festival of Ideas that local middle-class families attend, fun and thought-provoking though that may be, but the net must be cast far more widely.
If transport links around the city really do improve, we can hope to see easier access into the city from Fenland villages, where job opportunities may be scant, so it becomes all the more important that training opportunities are available within the University, and that this fact becomes widely known. Of course, it’s not just the University of Cambridge. Anglia Ruskin University is already active in this area. I hope – from the discussions held earlier this year – more local companies will feel able to take on such youth training opportunities, facilitated by the Opportunities Hub that is being set up through Cambridge University Health Partners which aims to cover this strand and much more. Some funding has been obtained to get this initiative under way.
It is encouraging that the University is focussing on its civic responsibilities. I look forward to seeing both the local economy flourish and infrastructure improve as the OxCam Corridor funding flows in, and the local youth feeling included in the benefits that derive from the investment.
