During Phase 1 of our Manchester 2025 strategy, over 5,500 colleagues, students, alumni, and community members took part – with more than 1,500 bookings across 22 workshops and 2,869 online contributions. From big ideas on AI, sustainability, and innovation to reflections on culture, wellbeing, and equality, your input is helping us define what matters most as we look ahead.

Few colleagues would claim that we’ve all been on the same journey together over the last few years, so the goal of becoming one university is self-evidently an important and justifiable one. However, it does beg the question: why are we not already one university?

How can we fund our University of the future? Help us explore what changes we need to make to achieve our dreams in 2035 and beyond.   

How will we keep at the forefront of social responsibility and take it to the next level in the next 10 years? Now is our opportunity to write the next chapter of our work in service to society.  

Looking to 2035, how will our university come to be recognised as a place that played a pivotal role, through our research and its impact, in addressing the big challenges that the country and the world faced? 

Exploring the critical questions underpinning what it means to be ‘one university’ and inviting you to co-create the details of the University’s strategy for the next decade. 

Imagine it’s 2035 and we’ve reinvented teaching, learning and student experiences for a diverse community of learners. What did we do? How does it feel for our students, prospective students, staff and alumni?