Leadership Foundation

Details have been announced of the successful bids for the £1 million made available through the Innovation and Transformation Fund (ITF).

The Leadership Foundation and the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) launched the fund last September. Competition for the £1m was extremely high, with bids from over 80 applications totalling £8.1m. Over the past six months, the steering group has worked with applicants to finalise the list of projects that will proceed and be developed.

The ITF was launched after Universities UK published The Diamond Report, Efficiency and effectiveness in higher education. It aims to ensure that the strategic themes and recommendations in the report are actively explored and implemented. The projects being taken forward are all critically useful to the sector during this major period of transition. The steering committee believes that they engage with core academic issues in higher education unlock knowledge, and offer evidence of compelling stories of change which can be applied collaboratively in a competitive environment.

Half of the successful projects are being led by higher education institutions, the others by organisations closely allied to the higher education sector. Most have already identified a range of partners with whom they plan to work, from within and outside higher education. The conditions of the ITF encourage participation from as wide a range as possible of higher education institutions and other stakeholders, to ensure widespread awareness, testing and embedding of the projects’ initiatives.

The list of the successful projects

1. Building Human Resource Capacity and Collaboration in UK Students’ Unions
2. Delivering efficiency through effective benchmarking
3. The Innovation and Efficiency Hub (‘the Hub’)
4. Open Course in Technology Enhanced Learning (OCTEL)
5. Outsourcing as a route to efficiency and effectiveness in the higher education sector in the UK
6. The Procurement Academy
7. Procurement Maturity Assessments (PMA) for all English HEIs
8. Student Advisory Model (SAM)
9. A Transferrable Model for Academic Workload Management and TRAC Reporting

Notes to editors

If you would like to find out more about the projects please contact the project lead directly.