Reshaping our Estate aims to create a University of Cambridge estate that is more efficient, more effective, more environmentally sustainable and fit-for-purpose that will better support the University’s academic mission.
One of the Reshaping our Estate Principles captures the ambition that ‘our estate should create a positive and productive working and learning environment for our staff and students and support excellence in teaching and research, and our public-facing activities’.
Noting the importance of education space, the University’s General Board agreed a formal Education Space programme within Reshaping our Estate.
"A world-class university needs high-quality, accessible teaching and learning spaces. Exceptional education facilities help us attract the very best students and academics, and they improve the experience of those using them. High quality spaces also facilitate innovative teaching practices and encourage encounters between people across all disciplines, which is vital to our academic mission."
Professor Bhaskar Vira, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education
The Education Space programme is committed to enabling the academic mission of the University by creating a world class future teaching, learning and assessment environment. To achieve this, we need to understand our education space, optimise use of existing education facilities to meet current demand and target improvements.
This will be achieved through two workstreams:
- Workstream one: meeting the needs of today
- Workstream two: looking to the future
Workstream one summary
- Achieve 100% visibility of School education space data (and systems used locally to manage it), to give an accurate assessment of supply and demand across the University. Data will need to be manually collected and used as a baseline from which to do modelling and consider processes as well as systems requirements in future. This is achievable in the short- term using the methodology for the Sidgwick project.
- Improve the University’s ability to support digital assessment provision to support digital assessment where it is needed.
- Increase and improve the University’s access to examination space.
- Undertake a University-wide and strategic approach to the development and introduction of new systems as well as the processes around education space utilisation and needs.
- Understanding the baseline facts and improving access to information on education estates for staff, students and decision makers (on condition, accessibility, AV/IT provision and support) via audits, reporting.
The Programme Board for Education Space
The Education Space programme reports to the Programme Board for Education Space (PBES) which was established by the General Board in 2017.
PBES, is accountable to the General Board, and reports to the Planning and Resources Committee (PRC) and, is fully aligned with the Reshaping our Estate programme. It supports the delivery of the vision for the education estate whilst also ensuring initiatives proposed by Schools, Faculties and Departments support the strategic education needs of the University.
The PBES vision is:
To develop an estate that consistently enables world-class teaching, learning, and examination facilities for staff and students—facilities that are inspiring, sustainable, accessible, adaptable, and efficiently utilised, meeting the needs of today and the future.
Since 2017, PBES has championed a range of successful initiatives to:
- Understand the volume, location and standard of education space across the estate.
- Improve the quality of many centrally managed education spaces.
- Support improvements to services and systems and increased the use of centrally managed education spaces.
- Establish Estates standards of performance and quality of education spaces.
These standards have informed an audit of a subset of existing facilities and subsequent schedule of improvement works (improvements to the Law Lecture Theatres, Biffen Lecture Theatre, Cockcroft Lecture Theatre and Sidgwick Lecture Block). A second tranche of improvement works is planned to meet needs highlighted by Schools (PRC funded).
Contact us
If you have a question about Education Space please contact the Reshaping our Estate team at: ReshapingourEstate@admin.cam.ac.uk