De Montfort University

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Universities of the 21st century will be defined by the global connectedness and cultural competence of their staff, students, alumni and stakeholders, and their contribution to improving global societal and economic development.
Two-way student mobility designed to transform our students' cultural competence sits at the heart of our internationalization agenda. We will build on the early success of QAA-commended #DMUglobal and expand it to be the most accessible, extensive, and flexible international experience program of any UK university. To ensure students gain the maximum benefit from their experience, we will provide innovative language learning and cultural preparation schemes embedded within our academic activities. To ensure that we can increase the number of incoming exchange students, we will review our curricula to ensure that it is flexible enough to cater for students from across the globe and not just those whose home HE systems are carefully matched to our own.
We will not be able to achieve our ambitions without expanding the range and depth of our international strategic partnerships and forming an integrated global network of similar organizations worldwide. We will continue to develop sector-leading, multi-strand relationships with global organizations whose values closely align with our own. By doing so, we will improve our international profile and secure significant investment that will enhance our student experience and research. We recognize that strategic partnerships will not just be measured financially, and will develop a focused portfolio of partnerships that yield a range of benefits to our students, our researchers, and the University as a whole.
Our strategy to transform the cultural competence of our students means increasing substantially the number of students we have from outside the UK. Our partnerships will help enable the step-change in the size of our global community that we seek by 2020. We will also actively develop new relationships with and engage further with existing European partners to increase our proportion of students from the EU.
Our academic ambitions will drive our success by 2020. It will be enabled by an intense focus on improving our efficiency and effectiveness and developing a vibrant scholarly community whose strength is in its diversity. We must be proactive in our recruitment and retention of high-quality academic and professional services staff, working towards a reputation for being a preferred choice for those in their early careers and high-performing established staff. We will better support staff to understand how their contributions relate to our strategic success and will have a supportive performance culture that focuses on enabling all staff to achieve their potential. Further developing our workload models, and having efficient systems and processes, will enable us to decrease the administrative load on academic staff, thereby increasing time for academic development.
Being pro-active in recruiting and retaining students from all sections of society who will benefit from the DMU experience will remain a priority. This includes developing an even stronger postgraduate community to provide a pipeline to doctoral study and further enhance our graduates' employability. Widening access across all our learning opportunities will be a core principle of our admissions policies to enable us to maintain and enhance our student community's diversity.
To support this, we will continue developing a physical environment that encourages an atmosphere of innovation, inspiration, and community. We will further develop a culture based on mutual respect and understanding, as well as freedom of thought and expression. This will ensure that we value the different contributions and experiences of all who make up our community. The investment will be focused on areas that are strategically important to us, and we will disinvest from areas that do not meet this criterion. We will regularly and rigorously review our schools and directorates' performance to ensure that they are delivering their required contribution to our success.
De Montfort University (DMU) is a dynamic institution with a long and vibrant history of improving people's lives through education. Founded as the Leicester School of Art in 1870, the University has evolved through many incarnations, including the Leicester Colleges of Art and Technology and Leicester Polytechnic.
Leicester Polytechnic officially became De Montfort University on 26 June 1992. The name was chosen to reflect the University's long association with Leicester by commemorating the celebrated Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, a crucial figure in medieval history who established the first parliament in 1265.
Our reputation for quality and distinctiveness in teaching and research is a direct result of our heritage. Many modern DMU courses have their roots in the late 19th century and early 20th century, when the School of Art and Leicester Technical School began training apprentices for local industries such as boot and shoe manufacture, furniture making and design, hosiery, and textiles manufacture, engineering, printing, and bookbinding.
Art, pharmacy, corsetry, footwear, physical sciences, and architecture were taught at the Schools and are still in evidence at DMU today, either as courses in their own right or as integral components of more advanced courses. A commitment to ensuring teaching kept pace with the changing needs of businesses meant that computing courses were introduced in the 1960s DMU's computing degrees are still highly valued by industry. The University has grown and evolved over the years. However, it is still dedicated to providing inspirational teaching to students, and it has a significant impact on the world around it.

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