Skip to content Accessibility statement
Strategy refresh
HomeAbout the UniversityMission and strategies: Vision for YorkStrategy refresh

Shaping our future, refreshing our Strategy

Our current Strategy has been in place since the start of the decade, and has served us well during some turbulent times for UK Higher Education. 

We're now refreshing our current Strategy to guide us until 2035 and beyond.

This is not the launch of a new strategy. Our commitment to public good is an enduring one, whatever challenge or change is thrown at us. 

Read the VC's reflections on the Strategy refresh as he shares his thoughts on our position and our future.

Our four strategic principles will remain: environmental sustainability, interdisciplinary collaboration, internationalism and inclusion. 

We are evolving our aims, to provide more focus and resilience, and to shape our thinking and set out paths of action through to 2035.

Hearing from you

From March to May 2026, we are organising a series of discussion forums. 

We will be engaging with our established networks and committees, as well as setting up opportunities to hear your thoughts. We want everyone in our community to have the chance to reflect on these evolved Strategic Aims and share what they mean for you.

Introduction for staff

We begin with some open sessions for staff, to help set the scene and answer your questions. 

Engagement sessions

The introduction meetings will be followed by a series of engagement sessions: we'll provide more details about these sessions as soon as possible.

At the engagement sessions, we will prompt discussion around this set of questions. We can select the topics that matter most to you, and consider one or two questions to help us imagine the kind of University we might be in 2035.

Community questions for our Strategy refresh
  1. How will we work across disciplines and institutions to maintain our competitiveness and success in research as funding opportunities change over the next years?
  2. How will we drive up the proportion of industry income in our research portfolio to double or treble that of now by 2035? 
  3. How much space in our curriculum should there be for work-related learning and skills as we adapt to a changing graduate labour market and changing student expectations?
  4. What will it take for York to become an online education provider at scale?
  5. How will we ensure our teaching and student services support the increasing diversity of our students (widening access, commuter, articulation, international, online, part-time, CPD, apprenticeship, TNE) as the modes and locations in which we deliver our education evolve? 
  6. How will we build and deepen a civic partnership in York which helps to renew and deepen public trust in universities?
  7. What is our appetite for closer collaboration with partner universities in the region in research, student education, enterprise and university operations? 
  8. How will we practise our academic mission of quality and purpose across, say, five TNE campuses in different parts of the world? 
  9. How will we grow the scale of our research portfolio through international partnerships, including work developed through our TNE campuses?
  10. How will we support academic and professional services staff to fulfil their potential at the different stages of their career in light of change in the sector? Do we understand and support the needs of all of our staff in the light of these changes? 
  11. How will we need to adapt and develop our partnership with our student body amid the changes we are set to face?
  12. How different will our physical and digital infrastructure need to be in ten years time?

Keep coming back to this page to find more opportunities to get involved.