“Like all universities, the pandemic brought extraordinary challenges and through collaboration and involving students in decision-making, we rose to these challenges,” she said. “We found new and innovative ways to protect the quality of what we deliver, implementing new online systems and resources, and our teaching staff were exemplary in their resilience and dedication to ensuring we achieved this. 

“We’ve offered an unprecedented level of support over the past year, from academic to mental health and hardship funding, and made sure we had policies in place to ensure academic fairness. And before the pandemic, we invested £130 million in our campuses and training facilities and know students are going to benefit enormously from being able to utilise these properly in the next academic year. 

“Through our new partnership with the Russell Group University of Warwick, we aim to raise the bar even higher, providing students with exciting undergraduate and postgraduate study and research opportunities, access to the broad employer networks of both universities to help them achieve strong employability outcomes, and online learning and library resources that complement our own award-winning library services and hi-tech learning environments.”