Annual Review 2023: A year of celebration and transformation

The University is constantly exploring ways to enhance the student experience

Large group of students at campus event on the SU Rood during freshers week

A year of celebration

The University is constantly exploring ways to enhance the experiences available to its students. That was rewarded in 2023, when it was awarded triple Gold – one of only 27 institutions to achieve such recognition – in the latest round of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF).

The government’s Office for Students (OfS), which runs the TEF, praised the student experiences offered by the University as being of outstanding quality. An independent panel highlighted outstanding provision across the majority of courses and subjects in relation to student outcomes. It also praised the University’s vision for advancing knowledge and transforming lives within local, national and global contexts.

We have always made a commitment to our students to provide a first-class student experience enriched by research, professional work and self-development opportunities. Being rated TEF triple Gold reaffirms that approach is yielding results, and providing our graduates with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in their careers.

Judith Petts CBE
Vice-Chancellor

The University has also been recognised for its work to inspire and support future generations of entrepreneurs, and its commitment to engaging with the business community in the South West and beyond. In the third edition of the Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF), Plymouth was listed among the highest ranked universities for its work to commercialise its intellectual property into spin-out companies now tackling many of the key global challenges of our time. It is also one of the highest ranked universities for the support it provides to graduate startups, and for its ongoing efforts to enable small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) to benefit from its expertise and facilities.

A year of transformation

2023 has been a year of almost unprecedented change on the University’s city centre campus. Continued investment through the Campus Masterplan has resulted in the completion of two significant refurbishments, with work also starting on a number of other major projects.

The state-of-the-art spaces within the Babbage Building have been specifically envisioned to inspire creativity, innovation and collaboration from the engineering and design pioneers of tomorrow. The building embodies the University’s systems thinking approach by bringing STEAM – science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics – subjects together to support academic collaboration and innovation. It now houses specialist equipment and laboratories dedicated to clean energy, autonomous systems, virtual engineering, precision manufacturing, digital fabrication, high performance computing, and much more.

InterCity Place, overlooking the city’s railway station, has created a cutting-edge space in which to train and develop the next generation of nurses, midwives, allied health professionals, optometrists and social workers. Within the 11-storey building, students can hone their skills in brand new teaching facilities using a range of health technologies and digital innovations. At a time when future generations of healthcare professionals have never been in greater demand, InterCity Place strengthens the University’s position at the forefront of healthcare education in the South West.

Both buildings have been completed using the latest low-carbon technologies, furthering a commitment to sustainability which saw the University become only the second in the UK to secure carbon neutral status. Similar innovations are also being applied in the transformation of the Fitzroy Building, which will in 2025 become the new home of the Plymouth Business School.