University of Gloucestershire

We welcome international students from around the world. Studying in the UK can be a great experience allowing you to meet new people, try new things and experience a new country. Come and join us. We offer placement year and short work experience options through our Degreeplus initiative, giving you valuable work experience for the job market. 94% of our graduates find jobs or further study within six months of graduating.

The University of Gloucestershire has a vibrant academic community where creative research is conducted at a high level. Each of our 10 academic schools contribute to our learning-led, research-informed environment. We embed research in all our activities, ensuring students and staff benefit from and contribute to vibrant subject communities, engaged in fundamental and applied research.

Our research has been rated as world-leading in all of our submitted research areas. More than 25% of the work in all six of the university’s submissions to the REF was recognised as internationally excellent or world leading. All results are available as ‘quality profiles’ on the REF website. We are developing Research Priority Areas (RPAs), building on our strengths and recognising the opportunities to contribute to contemporary challenges. These include:

• sport, exercise and wellbeing
• environmental dynamics and governance
• being human: past, present and future
• applied design for business
• retail, marketing and management
• learning for professional contexts

Our staff and students contribute to a range of research centres and institutes, ensuring programmes of research develop and are promoted. Our extensive postgraduate community continues to grow across our range of subjects, with many of our graduates continuing to collaborate with us on research projects. The funded research programmes continue to develop, attracting funding from research councils, European Commission, charities and a range of public, private and third sector organisations.

With a longstanding and thriving sporting tradition, the University of Gloucestershire boasts a range of applied regional, national and international externally funded research programmes in six key topics spanning sport, exercise and wellbeing. Colleagues from across the university and beyond collaborate, drawing particularly from the School of Sport and Exercise, the School of Leisure and the School of Natural and Social Sciences. These topics include:

From global warming to biodiversity loss, some of the greatest issues the world faces today are at the heart of our environmental dynamics and governance research. Drawing on expertise from across the university and beyond, including the School of Natural and Social Sciences and the Countryside and Community Research Institute, the largest specialist rural research centre in the UK, the collaborative research directly informs our teaching and postgraduate research opportunities. Focusing on four key areas, the team engage with individuals and organisations to develop and share information, in turn shaping institutions and enabling innovation.

Investigating social, ecological and social-ecological systems assesses resilience to changes in climate and conservation management. Climate change dynamics and societal change develops predictive work based on climate reconstruction, while environmental policy and strategies facilitates participatory action and knowledge exchange. Institutional change and Innovation works with organisations of all scales, looking to develop resilience as we face the future together. Having recently submitted our research to the national 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) exercise, and started to develop six research priority areas (themes), we are now working to revise the research strategy in line with a revised academic strategy.