UCL’s Strategic Plan Consultation: Our Response

Read the Co-Production Collective’s community’s response to UCL’s proposed strategic plan.

At the end of January, we shared that University College London (UCL) was consulting on a new five-year strategic plan. UCL is the home of Co-Production Collective, so we wanted to make sure that our co-production community had the opportunity to share your thoughts and feedback, particularly in relation to potential role of communities, co-production and collaboration. You can catch-up with how we did this, and find more information about the strategic plans, in our previous blog.

Our response

We collated the thoughts of all those who responded and submitted Co-Production Collective response to UCL’s internal platform (not accessible to anyone outside of the university) at the end of March.

In total, 41 individuals from across our community contributed to the final response – a hugely diverse range of co-producers bringing lived, living and learnt experience from so many different backgrounds. You can read the full list of contributors here. We want to say a huge thank you to all of you.

Our main message to UCL, was that the proposed strategy could be more ambitious in its aims to embed working with external partners and the community, and more concrete in its plans for achieving this. Specifically, we covered five main points:

• The importance of an authentic values-based way of working

• The importance of genuinely working in partnership

• Whose voices are heard in deciding what ‘change for the better’ looks like?

• UCL needs to invest more in relationships with those beyond the university

• UCL needs to do more to connect its research ‘Grand Challenges’ to real lives and do more to challenge intersectional and structural inequalities

We also highlighted Co-Production Collective’s position within UCL, in the context of our existing work in these areas, the lessons we’ve learnt and the knowledge our community to have to offer. Despite bringing in £850K in funding over three years (all of which goes back into Co-Production Collective activity), we are not core funded by the university. With this stability, we could do so much more to support UCL to work with communities in genuine partnership – in the development of this strategy and beyond.

Read the detail

You can read the full response (12 pages) or a summary version (2 pages) below:

• Full response as a PDF

• Full response as a text-only Word document

• Summary response as a PDF

• Summary response as a text-only Word document

What next?

UCL is halfway through its consultation, as set out below:

• Phase 1 and 2: now complete
• Phase 3: April-June 2022 - UCL will publish a paper exploring what is needed to enable its academic mission and achieve its aims.
• ​Phase 4: July-September 2022 - the final overall draft Strategic Plan will be shared for review before being finalised.

We have offered to facilitate a session for those leading UCL’s strategy process to meet with our community. We’ll let you know if they respond and will share more information about the final two phases when we have it.

In the meantime, if you’d like to share your thoughts with us, please get in touch: coproduction@ucl.ac.uk

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