SOLENT STRATEGY 2025

For us, student success means ensuring our students are ready for the future world of work, enterprise, and volunteering.

We’ll achieve this by offering a portfolio of exciting, modern and academically rigorous degree courses with employment-focused, real-world learning that prepares students to succeed in their chosen profession, vocation or enterprise.

We are proud our university is in the top 10 in the country for the number of graduates who start up their own businesses. Through the lifetime of this strategy we are committed to supporting entrepreneurial students, graduates and alumni and celebrating their success.

A commitment to teaching excellence will be delivered through an innovative and inclusive curriculum; engaging face-to-face and online learning; a transformative digital infrastructure; and access to state-of the-art, industry-standard specialist equipment including laboratories, studios and simulators.

Our Transformation Academy, which is operated by Solent’s Learning and Teaching Institute, will ensure our online teaching is sector leading and meets the needs of current and future students. The Academy will ensure we have learned what we can from the Covid-19 lockdown in terms of ensuring student success. For example, how and when to use online learning and how to develop resilient graduates through immersive hybrid courses and campus-based courses.

An outstanding student experience, working with individuals to nurture their development and ambitions, will underpin a seamless and integrated pathway from undergraduate, to postgraduate, to CPD study.

Our vibrant learning and social environments and wide range of student-centred support will reflect our core values, and our commitment to employability, equal opportunities and the environment - creating a place where students can belong and succeed.

We strive for real-world learning, real-world research and real-world impact. This means that the successes of our students and our engagements with our communities are shaped and inspired by our applied research and knowledge exchange. Our aims are to learn from our local, international and global communities about their priorities, challenges, experiences and successes, and for those communities to benefit from the outcomes of our applied research.

Our strategic research themes and knowledge exchange priorities are:

Research themes

1. Environment and Engineering: safe and sustainable energy, transport, and material systems.
2. Social Research and Policy: improving individual and community wellbeing through practice, provision, and policy.
3. Human Function and Health: The evaluation of human function, health and the social context.
4. Media, Culture and the Arts: communication, cultural and media studies, creative arts and practice.

Knowledge exchange priorities

1. Maritime: autonomous shipping, alternative energy, seafarers' employment, and training maritime trainers.
2. Sustainable Business: small business growth, entrepreneurship and sustainability, leadership and management skills, and business education and enterprise.
3. Justice: human rights, ethical practice, safeguarding society, and legal education.
4. Health and Wellbeing: community physical health and mental wellbeing, and corporate consultancy in health, sport and exercise science consultancy.
5. Student Entrepreneurship: creative industries, enterprise, and intellectual property.
6. Engineering: hydrodynamics, composites design manufacture, engineering material, CAD, simulation, and automation.

We will develop and sustain a virtuous circle where research generates the knowledge that allows us to work in partnership with key stakeholders to help our communities meet their challenges, which in turn further informs our teaching and drives more engagement and research.

Read our Research and Knowledge Exchange Enabling Strategy in full

Through our students, research and knowledge exchange, we will have a positive impact on the communities we belong to and the place we call home.

We are committed to having a positive role in shaping the future of Southampton and beyond, and to delivering opportunities for our students, staff and alumni to be part of that regional success.

To do this we will seek to understand what our different communities need and want to ensure our work is mutually beneficial.

We will create new partnerships and strengthen long-standing relationships in our local community, opening up our campus to share skills and resources, learning from and supporting the places we belong to.

Our new Solent Law School and Solent Business School will collaborate with the business community to actively promote entrepreneurialism and support the digital and maritime economies that define our city.

We will maintain and deepen our relationship with our alumni to encourage them to become lifelong learners at the University and to support our current students.