Cultivating Ambition

We set challenging and important goals. We are willing to grapple with the most difficult intellectual and practical problems of our time and are not easily daunted. We want to attract and retain people with ambition and provide them with opportunities to realise their dreams and develop their talents.

What are our goals?		Our priorities up to 2015	We will do this by...	Key measures of our success that we can benchmark our performance against (KPI number)
4	Inspire and enable our students to stretch themselves and achieve greater things.	We need to: • Encourage our students to set and achieve the highest aspirations and goals for their futures. • Foster enterprise in our students so that they contribute to the economic wellbeing of society. • Expose students to the University’s research work. • Develop students’ ability to learn and work autonomously through relevant research-based learning in their own discipline and through the development of skills in information processing. • In conjunction with the Union of Students and the voluntary sector, provide opportunities for all students to enhance their life experience outside the University.	• Reviewing the way we embed enterprise and personal development opportunities in our portfolio. • Ensuring that students understand and benefit from the employability focus in their courses. • Enabling all students to gain experience of research and an understanding of its impact on society. • Increasing the number of Sheffield Graduate award recipients. • Increasing the number of students taking part in ambassadorial, project work and voluntary/social enterprise initiatives.	• Student satisfaction (overall satisfaction from NSS) (KPI 11). • Percentage of students no longer in higher education after one year (KPI 13). • Percentage of graduates in further study or employment (KPI 14).
5	To create an environment that enables all staff to achieve at the highest level.	We need to: • Ensure that recognition and reward schemes encourage high ambition. • Ensure all academic staff are prepared for teaching. • Ensure staff pursue ongoing professional development to stay effective and inspiring as teachers and as researchers. • Enable staff to equip themselves for leadership roles in teaching and research. • Give our teachers and researchers the support they need to be part of major international networks.	• Placing the Sheffield Academic concept at the centre of all we do to support academic staff. • Holding annual personal development discussions to identify Initial or Continuing Professional Development needs, within the context of the Sheffield Academic concept. • Recognising individuals’ achievements in both teaching and research. • Agreeing the quality and volume of measures of research outputs for the REF 2014.	• Number of postgraduate taught students per academic FTE (KPI 6). • Number of postgraduate research students per academic FTE (KPI 17). • Research Excellence Framework (REF) performance – methodology to be confirmed (KPI 18).