Executive Search and recruitment of 3 Pro Vice Chancellors

Tender description

The University of Bedfordshire is an internationally recognised award winning institution with an excellent academic and teaching reputation. It appears in the Times Higher Education World University rankings and was also ranked as one of the top 250 universities in the world under 50 years old in the Young University rankings. The University celebrated a Silver award in the first ever Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) and recently came eighth in the UK in the People and Planet University Green League. It has high levels of student satisfaction and was recognised for the quality of its teaching in the last National Student Satisfaction, ranking 9th as the most improved university for teaching (2016 to 2019). Bedfordshire is renowned for its vibrant and cosmopolitan student population that includes more than 20,000 students from over 100 countries. It is a modern university that offers a wide range of degree courses that are tailored to meet the needs of its students, providing them with transformational opportunities through access to an excellent educational experience. It has seen a sharp improvement in the quality of its research. In 2013 the University won the prestigious Queen's Anniversary Prize for its pioneering research into child sexual exploitation, while REF 2014 saw almost half of its research classified as world leading or internationally excellent - the highest ratings possible. Today research at Bedfordshire continues to tackle the real-world problems challenges faced by its communities. Most recently a project to develop culturally aware health assistance robots and Home Office funding to undertake work on modern slavery and the policing of cyber-harassment. Bedfordshire is also leading the way in expanding educational opportunity; more than half its students come from lower socio-economic backgrounds or from families with no history of participation in higher education. More than a third are mature returners to education and around a quarter are from Black or ethnic minority backgrounds under-represented in higher education. The University of Bedfordshire is a modern, innovative university with a heritage of top quality education going back more than 100 years. It gained university status in 1992 as the University of Luton before expanding to become the University of Bedfordshire in 2006, when it merged with the Bedford campus of De Montfort University. Today it has two main campuses in Luton and Bedford, but is also active in Aylesbury, Milton Keynes, London and Birmingham, as well as globally, with a growing portfolio of international partnerships as far afield as Myanmar, Egypt, Vietnam, Oman and Mauritius. The University is structured into four academic faculties: the Business School; the Faculty of Creative Arts, Technologies and Science; the Faculty of Education and Sport; and the Faculty of Health and Social Sciences.