One University
We will build a diverse community of staff and students from a broad range of backgrounds, demographics and cultures, and create an inclusive, supportive and collaborative environment in which they can succeed and flourish.
Priority one: Collaborative & supportive culture
We will foster a collaborative culture where staff and students are all active participants in the success of the University.
Freedom of speech and academic freedom are fundamental to our research activities and we encourage and celebrate the open exchange of views and beliefs. We launched our Code of Practice on Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom, which outlines how we will protect and promote free speech across our research and education activities.
We continue with our work to ensure technical roles, skills and careers are better recognised, understood and aspired to. Our new technical career route has been developed based on insights from our technical workforce and illustrate what technical roles and skills look like across our grades and disciplines. These routes complement our existing Shared Skills Framework and professional services career routes to support colleagues with development and progression.
We continue to listen to our staff and will ask colleagues what they think about working at the University in our next Staff Survey in autumn 2024. We will use what they tell us to make a difference in the areas that matter most.
Our Staff Networks, groups and communities play an important role in creating a supportive and collaborative culture. There are over 20 Networks and communities and each of these provide support, create spaces for people to come together and inspire and encourage other colleagues across the institution - all of which are vital contributions to our University community and positively impact other colleagues.
Building on our work to improve progression and development opportunities for colleagues and postgraduate research (PGR) students, we are introducing a level 5 coaching apprenticeship. Qualified staff will form a cohort of internal coaches who can support colleagues across the University.
Priority two: Diversity & Inclusion
We will build a diverse community of staff and students that recognises and values the abilities, backgrounds, beliefs and ways of living for everyone. Our culture should ensure all members of the University community feel they belong and are treated with respect.
We retained our Silver Athena Swan Award for gender equality, a framework used to support and transform gender equality within higher education and research, and launched our updated Gender Equality Action Plan. Our updated plan consolidates and progresses the work we have done so far and responds to what our communities are telling us matters to them and what they need.
Following on from our work to refresh our LGBT+ strategy, particular focus has been on supporting our current and prospective LGBT+ students. We launched our new LGBT+ student web pages that outline the support, events and activities for LGBT+ students within and outside the University.
As part of our commitment to improving race equality, we applied for the Race Equality Charter Bronze Award. The Race Equality Charter self-assessment process was a crucial starting point for reassessing our race equality work. It includes our progress to date and an Action Plan outlining the steps we need to take. The outcome of our submission is expected in late 2024.
Looking forward and following a review and refresh of the Disability Equality Strategy earlier this year, actions focussing on improving the experiences of neurodiverse colleagues, colleagues who are D/deaf and those who have hearing loss have been added. These new actions have been developed following consultation with colleagues with lived experiences and focus on the activities that will improve inclusivity and accessibility.
Equality, diversity and inclusion are important themes relevant to all stages of the recruitment process. We’ve developed an inclusive recruitment hub that provides considerations for managers to better incorporate inclusive practices into their recruitment cycles.
Our inspirational women
As part of our gender equality work, we launched the Our People: Inspirational Women initiative which aimed to increase representation of women in portraits and photography around campus. Following a nomination process, 21 women were selected to feature in a special photography exhibition and these portraits have now been given permanent homes across our campus.
Priority three: Wellbeing
We will create a positive environment that supports and encourages the wellbeing of our staff and students, whilst empowering individuals to be responsible for their own wellbeing.
Supporting positive wellbeing and mental health and ensuring that staff and students can access the help and support they need is a key priority at the University of Sheffield. Building on recommendations from Student Minds, our Mental Health Action Plan outlines the steps we will take to ensure staff and students can receive the support they need.
We have continued our focus on providing specialist and tailored advice and support to colleagues. We have appointed an additional Staff Mental Health Adviser who joins our in-house Staff Mental Health Adviser Service and works closely with our Staff Disability Adviser.
As part of our work to ensure accessible mental health services and proactive interventions, we launched our How to Help resources. These resources empower and guide staff to identify the right services if they are interacting with someone in our University community who is in need of mental health support. A student-facing version of these resources are being developed and will shortly be shared with our student community.
We recognise that dual pressures of work and home life can be difficult for those with additional caring responsibilities. Our new carers passport, created in collaboration with the Carers Staff Network and in response to feedback from staff, makes it more straightforward for colleagues with caring responsibilities to request and review adjustments and support with their manager.
We are committed to supporting colleagues through major life transitions and our new fertility hub provides information and resources for those experiencing fertility challenges. It also provides guidance and tools to help managers support staff in the workplace and our new parenthood web page supplements our existing family leave support.
Priority four: Sustainability
We are continuing our work to make the University of Sheffield one of the most sustainable research-intensive universities in the country.
Our Scope 1 and 2 emissions for 2023–24 were 15,918 tCO2e*, a reduction of around 42% from our 2018–19 baseline.
Sustainability is a collective effort. Our Big Christmas Switch Off asked staff to ensure they are switching off equipment over the Christmas period. In 2023, this saw a reduction in electricity consumption of 3.5% compared to a similar period in 2022 and 34% lower than a ‘typical’ nine-day period. We also worked to ensure heating was being used efficiently, achieving a 54% reduction in heating consumption compared to a similar period in 2022–23.
Our active travel app, Betterpoints, has seen a 52% increase in users in the last year, with 6,388 staff and students now regularly logging journeys. Over 1.4 million active and sustainable journeys have been recorded, with around 950,000 of them replacing car trips, equating to 344 tonnes of CO2 avoided.
Following the appointment of a Sustainable Labs Manager, we are working towards the Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework (LEAF) scheme accreditation as a way of incentivising and measuring the sustainability achievements of our laboratories. In 2024, we became one of the first signatories of a new Concordat for the Environmental Sustainability of Research and Innovation Practice. This commits us to a number of areas for action and ensures we are at the forefront of efforts to reduce negative environmental impacts and transition to sustainable practices.
We are working closely with departments in relation to our Scope 3 carbon footprint, which is much higher than our direct (Scopes 1 and 2) emissions. Departments are now provided with a comprehensive report of their supply chain emissions to help see where the biggest impact is coming from and inform more sustainable procurement decision-making.
We have continued to invest in our buildings and campus to make them more energy efficient. For example, replacing the steam system in the Alfred Denny building will save 600 tCO2e a year, equivalent to around 4.3 million miles of driving. We’ve also invested in installing new LED lighting and motion sensors in several buildings, ensuring electricity is not being wasted.
2024 has seen us begin the process of researching and developing the next stage of our sustainability strategy, due to be published in 2025.
*net emissions
Priority five: Philanthropy
We will launch the University’s first multi-million-pound fundraising and engagement campaign, to increase and diversify philanthropic income and help create a sense of belonging and participation amongst our staff, students and alumni.
We will launch our first multi-million-pound philanthropic campaign, Forged in Sheffield, in autumn 2024. With many high profile alumni joining us for a flagship Question Time-style launch event in London and in promotional materials for our global supporter community, we are looking forward to showcasing our Sheffield students and our areas of research strength.
2023–24 has been an extremely successful year for philanthropic support. We’ve raised £11.5 million against a £6 million target. This included a £1 million gift from a local alumnus and £1.5 million from the Wolfson Foundation, the largest award the Foundation made in that round. Both gifts will go towards a core capital project in the Faculty of Health, expanding translational neuroscience facilities and creating more capacity for medical teaching. We have now raised more than £8 million towards this new facility.
In June 2024, we delivered another successful Big Walk community fundraising event. The event brought our community together and helped raise the profile and reputation of the University of Sheffield as a centre of excellence for motor neuron disease research. We were grateful for involvement from Hollywood actor and Honorary Doctorate recipient Dominic West, and from ITV who were present at the finish-line.
Our fundraising in support of students continues to grow. We raised £1.6 million for scholarships, bursaries and hardship in 2023–24. At least 415 students joining the University of Sheffield in 2024–25 will receive donor-funded scholarships. Many others will receive donor-funded grants to help pay for overseas study opportunities or work placements.
Our alumni engagement plans remain focused on supporting the core areas of: international recruitment, where we supported conversion events, ran alumni panels for international prospective students, and secured alumni to attend recruitment fairs; reputation and rankings, where we mobilised our alumni community in support; and delivering employability outcomes for students, where we ran sessions that improved career confidence, supported mentoring at scale, offered live company projects on courses and secured company visits.
We have expanded our offering to international Sheffield graduates through new in-country groups and the ongoing roll-out of the alumni-student platform Sheffield Connect. Alumni engagement with our suite of volunteering opportunities that build students’ career confidence remains as strong as ever.
Building our students’ career confidence
We are creating opportunities for our successful alumni to act as role models and a source of inspiration for our students. Our flagship London City Connections, which has been running for a decade, helps open doors for students who are less likely to have access to those all important networks. This year, 60 students from the Faculties of Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences took part in the series of alumni-hosted business visits, tours and workshops in London, before practising their networking skills at a global insurance company based out of the Lloyds building. For alumni, it’s a fantastic way to give back to the University and a chance to inspire, guide and advise the next generation of graduates.
Read more about our One University pillar and explore related case studies