Hello & welcome to another Bath Life Business Surgery. Today we're talking innovation, stimulation and training with @BathSpaUni

Come join us over on Zoom
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_6rhuKTSCTMOnE1TX5iGLJg

Exciting news! Our Bath Property Symposium and Awards will be in March 12. It comes in 4 parts: open networking, thought leadership, sponsor-hosted networking sessions & then, the main event, the awards

You can register online here https://hopin.com/events/bath-property-symposium

Welcome to our speakers! Andy Salmon, dean of the college of Liberal Arts and Tony Stimson, business development manager

Andy: 73% of our students are from the region, and most of them want to stay here. Our relationship with the regional economy, its culture and its ecosystems is really important

Andy: The pandemic hasn't changed anything - it has accelerated everything. Universities are civic organisations that need to be completely enmeshed in working for their communities. We are not isolated ivory towers.

Andy: The work Tony and I do is a microcosm of how we need to create the future. I have a wealth of theoretical knowledge, and Tony has years of business expertise

What is the RESTART programme?

Tony: it is a rapid ups killing programme organised by ourselves and @BathCollege. It is a series of modules where students plot their own pathway for what they want to go into - for example we have a course for budding entrepreneurs

Tony: It is to address the immediate impact of the pandemic, it is inclusive regardless of employment history and educational background and it is demand led. Part of the design process we went out into the business community and asked what skills they needed

Tony: It is provided at for free for adults over 19. You can access it through the Achieve in Bath website and we are launching our own website next week which will lay out the curriculum pathways and the modules.

What is ISTART?

Andy: It covers science, technology, art, research, teaching - in other words it cuts across all the traditional divides.

Andy: There's a big divide in education between levels - A levels, under grads, etc - they're now all involved in the university world but kept in very separate boxes.

Andy: ISTART is the first project of its kind in the UK where those levels will be mixed. For example a college student could work with an undergraduate could work with a start up business

Andy: It brings together educators - us, the college, the council - to provide co-curriculum. We are thinking about how we combine our resource and our capacity.

Andy: The curriculum we deliver connects with RESTART. RESTART is a pilot for the much bigger project of ISTART. If all goes according to plan, ISTART will have its own space in the centre of Bath by 2023.

Andy: We are designing the curriculum based around 2 things: the access needs of the people coming in, and the destination needs of the businesses.

Andy: It looks very very different from anything we currently do in that its short, modular based, stackable, blended and people can hop on and hop off as they need.

Andy: ISTART is partnership based, co-creative - the more business help we can get the better - skills gap-based and will therefore create a more productive employment pipeline

Why should businesses engage?

Tony: We are actively working with businesses on curriculum design. What's in it for them? The more they engage and help with the design the greater the likelihood of the programme being able to address their recruitment challenges

Tony: Secondly, we're looking for businesses to engage on an ongoing basis. On ISTART, we're looking for 'curated collisions' on content delivery, with businesses an active part of teaching

Tony: We're looking at aligning the content of ISTART with the Green Recovery. The skills we currently need for that don't exist at the scale they need to to take advantage of Green Investment. We're looking to address that with ISTART

How do you address long term value?

Andy: Engagement isn't going to cost them anything - other than time. In terms of the co-creative way of looking at things the question is more how to we use our resource to provide them a pipeline for employees and relevancy of training

Andy: 37% of smalll businesses say they don't have a training budget - we can be working with them to provide up-skilling and re-skilling training. As we come out of the pandemic that need is only going to increase

Tony: Last year we pitched the project to the West of England Combined Authority. We then spent months planning how to deliver the programme. The culmination of that is we will be resubmitting that pitch to WECA. If that is successful we will take it to the next stage

Is this unique to Bath?

Andy: Yes. The uniqueness is not having an innovation/start-up centre - loads of cities have those - neither is the skills pipeline. The uniqueness is bringing it all together under one project. Nobody has done that.

Andy: I think we've got used to the idea of the narrative that this discussion began with, that universities are useful but otherwordly. I want to abandon that narrative and instead ask how can a university for a driver for socio-economic good?

Andy: I want to engage the entire community. I want to get rid of the notion that students are just young people. An undergraduate course is useless to the immediate needs of a business - we want to create something quicker and more responsive to need as it arises

Andy: The way the modules are organised encourages people to follow their curiosity. They will collide with new areas of interest all the time - and we'll enable that.

Andy: It matters enormously in Bath for 2 reasons. First, business. Second, its in the city's DNA. Bath was created as an extraordinary feat of imagination - we need to have a 21st century version of that.

How will the project reach under-employed communities?

Tony: That is how we will derive benefits from the consortia approach. One of the big strengths of @BathCollege is its community connections. They do a lot of work with hard to reach communities outside of the city centre.

Tony: We will leverage their experience to emphasise that access point. It is one thing working on the access point, but we also need to make sure the curriculum then fits with people's needs, which requires a flexible business model

How will you address digital poverty?

Tony: We're looking at how we address the digital divide in the programme. We're working with communities to understand that. It goes beyond providing someone with a laptop - they need WiFi, they need to know how to use the machine.

How have businesses engaged?

Andy: When you stick within one sector, there is a danger of having a limited view of need - that all need is just your sectors need.

Andy: So we have engaged with companies, civic bodies and leading organisations across the city in a way that would look eclectic according to a traditional way of thinking. But we have done that because we want our thinking challenged.

Tony: we posed 2 questions: What content do you want to see in the programme, and how to you want to engage with it?

Tony: A couple of key things came through - the importance and consistency of skills, and the pipeline for the delivery of people who have those skills. The second was digital - we unpacked that and it ranges from an introduction to tech to the use of tech to solve challenges

What sorts of businesses have engaged?

Tony: @burohappold have helped us a lot with both projects, indicating the importance of problem solving skills. They said: "the ability to make sense in a world that is increasingly unpredictable" came through from them.

ony: We've spoken with @BathRugby about resiliency. A number of @BathBID companies have also been involved. @hotelindigobath emphasised the importance of upskilling their staff to further their careers

Andy: I thought that what would come through was the need for digital skills, but the primary issue was resiliency. It was wonderfully summed up by a CEO who said "can't you just teach people that it's okay to fail?"

How do you bring different communities together? Especially in a city with such wealth disparities

Andy: I have lived in Bath for 3 years and I love it here. 2 things strike me: the flow of the city means it lacks of specific gathering place - ISTART could provide this

Andy: Second, how do we work together more thoughtfully in a virtual way? We have a huge opportunity to connect in ways we didn't previously. In terms of the hard to reach, it is key to identify key stakeholders

Tony: One case study we're looking at is @TheEngineShed in Bristol. We need a similar space in Bath to provide the level of engagement they do - 30,000 visitors a year. That's our vision.

That's it for today. Thank you so much @BathSpaUni for an inspiring conversation. If you missed it live, you can watch again on our YouTube channel. You want to hear more about this exciting project!