Gillian Keegan MP visited the University of Chichester new Technology Park and Business School on their Bognor Regis campus. Gillian met with and taught a Business class to students from across a range of programmes that the university deliver including degree apprentices and international students. The University of Chichester have been running apprenticeship programmes for the last 18 months, working with large and small employers locally.
The Business School is at the forefront of regional development; not just through education. They are delivering business start-up and growth programmes across West Sussex and are leading the bid to deliver the £12m Business Support Services contract for Coast to Capital local enterprise partnership. They have also been working with Western Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust to deliver a Leadership development programme and are about to start work with Brighton hospitals on a similar programme.
Research there is focused around our Centre for Research in Business Sustainability. As an example, we are leading a project to develop a destination plan for sustainable tourism on the Manhood Peninsular. The business department recently won a substantial contract to lead an EU project to improve the quality of water through the creation of a market in which farmers are incentivised to adopt environmentally appropriate practice. The incentive is provided by downstream beneficiaries of the cleaner water, e.g. water companies, who have reduced cleaning costs.
Gillian also got the opportunity to see the site of the new Engineering & Digital Technology Park, that is currently under construction and is opening this summer. The park will put a little STEAM behind STEM. By bringing together science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics courses on one state-of-the-art site, we aim to produce graduates that have the enterprise skills, creativity and technical knowledge to enter the graduate workforce.
The existing departments of Engineering & Design and Creative & Digital Technologies will be based in the Technology Park from September 2018 alongside courses in Computing, Data Science, Cyber Security and Mathematics, and will deliver 500 new science, technology, engineering and mathematics undergraduate and postgraduate student places per year by 2020.
After the visit Dave Cooper, Professor of Management and Economic Development and Head of Department said: "The students really valued the session on the relationship between government, business and society and took part in a very stimulating discussion. It was also great to be able to show Gillian the new Tech Park and discuss the vision that links together engineering, creative media and business; giving focus to widening participation and outreach initiatives as well as stimulating SME innovation and growth."
Gillian said: It was great to meet with some students from the University of Chichester to discuss the relationship between government, business and society. I also got to explore the new Tech Park and I was blown away by their plans. Although it was touch and go wearing a white dress on a building site... Being there made me want to be a student again, who wouldn't want to study the latest in cutting edge tech at such a great University.
