Our Curriculum Redefined journey so far…

This past year has seen our student education community come together to drive forward a bold and ambitious education strategy. I genuinely believe this to be a once-in-a-career opportunity to transform learning and teaching for future generations here at Leeds, facilitated by the Curriculum Redefined project.

Last Christmas we started our 10-year journey. We initiated our first design workshops, 35 in all, engaging every school and involving over 250 colleagues and 70 students. This is where our collaboration, creativity and shared purpose for Curriculum Redefined was born.

Fast forward to this Christmas, and I couldn’t be prouder of the work we have achieved since those workshops. Through rich and purposeful conversations over the year, we have committed to redefining more than 650 programmes across our taught portfolio. This is incredible progress, made possible by so many people working together towards our shared goals. Thank you.

We’ve welcomed 75 new colleagues into our community, increasing our capacity for the work we want to do together. Alongside delivering inspiring and innovative teaching for our students, our new colleagues are dedicating time to collaborating with others across campus on a range of exciting projects. Together we will embed evidence-based, authentic, and transformative approaches to education that will be unique to this University.

I couldn’t be prouder of the work we have achieved... Through rich and purposeful conversations over the year, we have committed to redefining more than 650 programmes across our taught portfolio. This is incredible progress, made possible by so many people working together towards our shared goals. Thank you.

We have launched our ‘Learning Design Agency’, which is a new capacity to facilitate creativity and create efficiencies in the way we think and work together. We have also created new resources, launched via our new ‘Leeds Educator Space’, which is home to a great collection of more than 400 toolkits, blogs, materials and information about events, open to everyone at Leeds.

The New Year brings more opportunities to redefine teaching and learning here at Leeds. The work we have started on refreshing the Leeds Curriculum, co-created by our students and educators, will give Leeds’ students answers to the question “why Leeds”? We will also begin to work together to start building new and redefining existing programmes, developing new approaches to teaching, and making our assessments more authentic and effective (and fewer in number!).

I want to end by giving thanks to every individual who has played a role in the success of Curriculum Redefined this year. You care deeply about the continued success of this institution, and your care is clear in each meeting, piece of work, or casual conversation that I have. Thank you for your dedication and commitment.

You are also having lots of success, and I look forward to sharing the stories of the work happening in each school. Watch out for those stories in the new year. I can’t wait to see what we achieve in 2023.

Jeff

Jeff Grabill, Deputy Vice Chancellor, Student Education