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The Business Magazine July 2024
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Reshaping the University of Gloucestershire to face sector challenges 

The Business Magazine article image for: Reshaping the University of Gloucestershire to face sector challenges 
Clare Marchant
21 January 2025
Clare Marchant

UK universities face major economic challenges, so the University of Gloucestershire’s Vice Chancellor is prioritising students, study and staff

There are 166 universities in the UK, and Clare Marchant, who took over as Vice Chancellor at the University of Gloucestershire last summer, has visited more than 120 of them. 

How many other vice chancellors have done that? Very few I would guess, but none will have spent the previous six years as Chief Executive of UCAS (the UK’s Universities and Colleges Admissions Service in Cheltenham).

“At UCAS I developed a real passion for what drives students. Whether they’re 18-year-old British students, international or mature, how do they choose a university?” she says.

“I also visited many schools and colleges, where I saw classrooms of selected students going through the UCAS process.

“When I became its chief executive, I wondered why it wasn’t providing information, advice and guidance for all students, not just the 50 per cent whose schools had decided they should go to university.

“I wanted all students to have choice, and over my six years I succeeded in opening up the UCAS platform to hosting apprenticeships.”

While she doesn’t say it explicitly, it’s pretty clear that Clare’s views on widening choice across all students, irrespective of their career ambitions, were not shared by the whole of UCAS.

“One of the things that leaders of organisations should know is when the right time to move on,” she admits.

“I’d led UCAS through COVID as well as opening it up to apprenticeships, and I felt it was time for someone different.”

When she learned that Stephen Marston, her predecessor at the University of Gloucestershire was retiring, she threw her hat in the ring.

“I wanted to stay in Gloucestershire. While I’m not a native, I’ve been here more than 22 years but think that despite being a beautiful part of the country, it punches below its weight.

Clare was made Dame Commander of the British Empire in the King's Birthday Honours last year.

A catalyst for change

“As I see it, part of the reason is that perhaps there’s not enough collaboration and partnership across the region, and not enough grist – we’re not capitalising enough on the opportunities around us.

“This university can help put that right, I want us to work better with regional organisations, the supply chain and with our neighbours, such as GCHQ.”

Clare is talking from experience. Before she took over at UCAS, she was Chief Executive at Worcestershire County Council, and that role drew on her previous career in change management in the NHS and Deloitte.

It is interesting that very few UK universities have vice chancellors who are from a non-recent academic background, as Clare is (she graduated with a degree in politics before moving into the commercial then local government sector). More than 87 per cent come straight from academia. And less than 20 per cent of vice chancellors are women.

But now, more than ever in their history perhaps, universities face major challenges and must operate as businesses, so the university’s governors made a forward-looking choice in appointing Clare.

While October’s budget allowed the maximum tuition fees universities can charge to rise, operating costs have also risen, as has the level of Employer National Insurance contributions, which will easily cancel out the increase.

As a result, morale is low across all UK universities.

“This university has 1,000 members of staff who want to be inspired about the future, never mind the 9,000 or so students we teach,” said Clare.

“When I joined, the university already had a strategy, although it’s too long. So, while we have the essential building blocks, there wasn’t a golden thread running through the whole organisation.

A connected university

“We needed to ask ourselves, who are we and what are we offering, and from the surveys we undertook in my first few months, we developed the idea of a connected university.

“If a student comes here, we want them to feel connected to place and to the outcomes that we are striving with them to deliver.”

She then turned her attention to the university’s course offer. “Business and computing are really important to us, but we are underperforming in computing, so we are tidying up our course structures to focus on what students and industry are asking for.”

And while the university runs highly successful degrees in topics such as journalism and photography, the portfolio of courses in other arts and creative subjects has been narrowed because it’s not attracting the student numbers to make it viable.

However, numbers on health and social care degree courses are strong at the university, nursing currently less so as demand for places has dropped since Covid.

Historically universities have often added courses without cancelling others to chase student numbers, but Clare sees that uneconomic.

“We want consistency and teaching excellence across all our courses, and that’s what I’m striving for,” she says.

University to open Gloucester city campus

Updating a university’s course offer means adapting its physical building and campus requirements.

In 2021, the University of Gloucestershire took a huge gamble and bought the former Debenhams department store in Gloucester.

It was a brave (and costly) commitment to take on and refurbish such a prominent 1930s listed Art Deco building, but it garnered a lot of local government support and national levelling up funding, because everyone can see the benefits of bringing thousands of students, their spending power and community, right into the heart of a city undergoing major regeneration.

The project was already running late when Clare arrived at the university, but she is determined to see it through. “Fundamentally it will be fantastic for Gloucester when it opens next summer and while there are challenges, we are overcoming them. It will be wonderful to open the doors on a major new campus for students alongside a new home for the city’s library and other community activities.”

Alongside this major project the university is rationalising other parts of its estate, including selling off pockets of land such as its Hardwick Campus in Cheltenham, while its Park Campus in the town will become the university’s centre for creative and computing subjects.

To date, then, Clare’s tenure at the University has been all about embracing the necessary change that all universities are facing and making sure she talks with staff and students regularly.

“We are sharing what the future looks like and what there is to be optimistic about. For our students, it’s about their careers and the start of their life journey. And to achieve that you need the right team and the right leadership in place – and you need to keep a close eye on the money.”

A blueprint for change

The University of Gloucestershire isn’t alone of course. Last year, Universities UK, a collective voice of 141 universities, published a new report which it refers to as a ‘blueprint for change’.

The blueprint calls on the government to stabilise the sector’s finances and increase direct public funding in England so the cost of going to university is rebalanced towards government instead of students.

Clare fully endorses three key ideas within the report: undertaking a major efficiency drive by every university, widening participation and working more closely with local businesses – embracing the partnership approach about which she is most passionate.

From politics to higher education via a solid commercial career

After graduating with a degree in History and Politics from the University of Hull, Clare considered a career in politics, but instead took a graduate job at Rank Hovis McDougall.

“I was a production management trainee in cakes and bread. It was a very male dominated and that quickly toughened me up.”

She spent four years at the company before moving to management consultancy Deloitte. “Whatever my next career move was, I decided it definitely wouldn’t be visiting a food production line and wearing hair nets every day.”

At Deloitte, her clients included Burberry, the Midlands Electricity Board and Abbey National Bank – so absolutely no hairnets required.

From there she moved into government contracts for Deloitte, heading up one of the early NHS IT programmes.

Marriage and a baby followed, but putting her baby in a Leeds nursery before travelling around the UK for work was not what she wanted as a parent.

Her next career move, therefore, was into local government, as Head of Change at Worcestershire County Council.

While she reduced her travelling, what she hadn’t realised was quite how much her workload would increase.

“This was it in 2010, a tumultuous time for local government. It was the time of austerity and David Cameron and George Osborne’s big society aspirations.

“But I absolutely loved my three years in the role, and being able to make a difference in local government.”

When Worcestershire County Council’s Chief Executive decided to retire in 2014, Clare was appointed.

“Working in local government is gruelling, but I loved it and those in the sector have got a huge amount of resilience.”

It’s all about the people

Every industry she’s worked in over her career has seen huge change, which is why for Clare, everything goes back to the people.

“As Chief Executive of UCAS, and during my time at Worcestershire County Council, I got a clear idea of what good leadership looks like.

“In a world full of uncertainty, none of us truly know what’s going to happen in the future. But what I can do as a leader is to say that we will all go through this together, and I will learn as much from my team as I hope they do from me.”

Where does she see the University of Gloucestershire in a few years’ time?

“We will have a smaller physical footprint, but a bigger virtual footprint. We want to have more impact regionally, not just in terms of student recruitment but also in business and economic impact.

“We want to increase student numbers to more than 10,000 and our prospectus offer to truly represent what businesses want. I want us to go from strength to strength in the apprenticeship space and to widen the concept of lifelong learning, offering more short courses which can be built up into a full degree, if that’s what our students want.”


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Nicky Godding is editor of The Business Magazine. Before her journalism career, she worked mainly in public relations moving into writing when she was invited to launch Retail Watch, a publication covering retail and real estate across Europe.

After some years of constant travelling, she tucked away her passport and concentrated on business writing, co-founding a successful regional business magazine. She has interviewed some of the UK’s most successful entrepreneurs who have built multi-million-pound businesses and reported on many science and technology firsts.

She reports on the region’s thriving business economy from start-ups, family businesses and multi-million-pound corporations, to the professionals that support their growth and the institutions that educate the next generation of business leaders.

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