The Covid pandemic upended almost every corner of British life, and universities were no exception. But for the University of Birmingham, the turmoil became a turning point. The pandemic made the university think long and hard about the type of education it was delivering for its students, says Deborah Longworth, Birmingham’s pro-vice-chancellor for education.
This sparked an overhaul of its teaching and curriculum – which has been rewarded with impressive results. This year the University of Birmingham has been ranked in the Guardian University Guide’s top 20 for the first time in nearly a decade, reaching its highest ever position of 14th overall. The improvement is mainly thanks to a strong recovery in Birmingham students’ views of the university, after it dipped to alarmingly low levels during the pandemic and its aftermath.
Before 2020, Birmingham prided itself on providing a good experience on campus. For first-year undergraduates that includes courses on how to develop a LinkedIn profile – something that can come as a shock to parents who graduated from university at a time when many courses were unconcerned with career prospects. Adam Tickell, who took over as Birmingham’s vice-chancellor in 2022 as it was emerging from the pandemic, said the emphasis on developing employable skills within academic courses reflects the social change in the numbers going into higher education.
I graduated in the 1980s and one in 10 people went to university then, and now it’s around one in four, one in three. So things are different,” Tickell says. We know that motivations can vary.
Ultimately graduates do want control over their careers, so we’re trying to equip them for the job they really want rather than anything else.” So far the results have been impressive: nearly nine out of 10 recent graduates would choose to study at Birmingham again, according to data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency. The university is also adding an innovative programme named Ad Alta – taken from its Latin motto meaning striving for excellence – to explicitly develop students’ skills as part of the curriculum, as well a novel option that allows undergraduates to take an extra year to study an unrelated subject, such as AI and data science or environmental sustainability, outside their existing courses. Matt Hiely-Rayner, who compiles the Guardian’s University Guide, says Birmingham’s performance had been handicapped in recent years by below-average levels of student satisfaction, as measured by the Office for Students’ annual national student survey (NSS), especially in core disciplines such as medicine.
But the negative effects it recorded after the pandemic, which saw it drop to 37th overall four years ago, have now fallen away. In the past it may have been doing less well but its results have improved a great deal, and very rapidly,” says Hiely-Rayner, who noted that Birmingham’s highlights include top five places in a broad range of subjects including computer science, physics, music and drama and dance. Meanwhile Birmingham’s international reputation has also improved.
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