Strategy 2030

Teaching and Learning

Our teaching will match the excellence of our research. We will improve and sustain student satisfaction and wellbeing.

An engineering lecturer speaking in front of a class

We will support and promote teaching that focuses on experience, employability and an understanding of the value of creativity, curiosity, and even failure. We will encourage discussion and engagement with staff, students and partners.

We celebrate our students making the world a better place. We will keep attracting and retaining ambitious students, maximising their potential to ensure that our graduates go on to achieve success in whatever they do, wherever they go.

We will widen participation so that students from any background can come to study with us. We will offer accessible, responsive and efficient educational services as well as personal, pastoral and professional support. We will also encourage a culture of lifelong learning and attachment to our University community, letting every student know how much we value them, from the first time we meet them, to their graduation and for the rest of their lives.

We will not grow for growth’s sake. We will improve our student experience while aiming to keep our undergraduate community at a stable size. In reshaping our teaching for the future, we expect to expand interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary, postgraduate and digital education.

Complex problems are rarely addressed from a single perspective, so we have created a radically different space as a home for shared thinking, teaching and action. At the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) we will collaborate across disciplines. We will work with communities, businesses, non-government organisations, governments and other universities to plan for the future, and find ways to tackle the needs of our society.

In judging the success of EFI over time we will need to ask whether it has led to a transformation in terms of inclusive economic growth and social benefit. It needs to make a genuine difference.

Professor Lesley McAra, Director of the Edinburgh Futures Institute

EFI north elevation (Bennetts Associates)
EFI north elevation (image: Bennetts Associates)