Vice-Chancellor’s foreword
“Launching a new strategic plan brings with it ambition and optimism about the art of the possible – a chance to look back on achievements, and challenge ourselves about our next steps. The RCA is already a launchpad for the world’s creative leaders. We attract the most talented students who come to us as the world’s most influential postgraduate art and design school to have access to leading faculty and push the boundaries of their fields. The Strategic Plan 2022–27 is our roadmap to continue to do that – and much more”
Vice-Chancellor
The RCA’s Royal Charter is explicit about our contribution to the arts, design, industry, commerce and social development and it continues to underpin our purpose. By bringing together traditional and new disciplines, challenging social and cultural perspectives, and through interdisciplinary collaboration between faculty, students, researchers, industry and our communities, we create new knowledge, insights and innovations. Our graduates enter fields that are driven by innovation, technology and the power of personal creative expression. They go on to create social value, economic opportunity, enrich our visual culture and solve global challenges.
Throughout our 185-year history, we’ve continually evolved to meet the needs of the most talented artists and designers, creators and innovators. For the past decade, we have expanded the range of disciplines and choice of Master’s programmes on offer, with new programmes in Environmental Architecture, Service Design, Writing, and Contemporary Art Practice, to name but a few. We’re experiencing for ourselves the changing models of how people want to learn and the increasingly broad backgrounds of our graduates. Some 25% of students now come to the RCA with undergraduate degrees in subjects such as the sciences, history, law or social sciences – and this brings a richness of perspective to our community that we will continue to foster.
We’ve pioneered collaborative and interdisciplinary learning, integrating the arts and science as never before in an art-school setting. We’ve broken down silos and made faculty appointments in Robotics, Material Sciences and Computer Science. Through our award-winning incubator InnovationRCA, we’ve proved that technology and the creative arts are a powerful amalgam – “createch” – for successful new start-ups. We are proud to have seen 78 companies launched, 36% of them by women, with a combined valuation of almost £300m and a remarkable survival rate of 67% after five years. And we’ve demonstrated that design can be at the forefront of the research question, with the RCA as Principal Investigator leading UCL, Manchester, York and Leeds universities, in a major UKRI-funded research project in Materials Science and the Circular Economy.
RCA alumni, numbering more than 20,000 all over the world, are recognised as leaders in their disciplines, making national and international headlines as they shape the world in which we live. They are sought after and prominent in a wide range of industries, from the Apple design studio in Cupertino, California, to the automotive sector in Sweden and Germany, to fashion in India and Italy. The cultural and social benefits of their work were felt at the heart of the London 2012 Olympic Games, in the winning roster of artists in the Turner Prize, and in clinical settings, helping design out medical error in emergency paediatrics at St Mary’s Hospital, London.
The RCA’s pioneering research-led academic approach truly comes alive in our new building at Battersea, which opens as we launch this strategy for 2022–27. Designed by world-renowned architects Herzog & de Meuron, it is the largest addition ever to the RCA campus – representing the greatest capital investment we’ve made to date in our academic vision, supported by £54m from HM Treasury, as well as generous donations from private donors such as the Sigrid Rausing Trust, the Spiegel Family Foundation, The Clore Duffield Foundation, the Linbury Trust, the Helen Hamlyn Trust, Logitech, Apple, Sir Jony and Lady Ive, the Monday Charitable Trust, Manfred and Lydia Gorvy, the Wolfson Foundation, Fidelity UK, the Debbie Lo Creativity Foundation, Hyundai Motor Group, the Prosit Philosophiae Foundation and the Garfield Weston Foundation.
As well as providing expanded facilities for InnovationRCA, this new campus is equipped with a robotics hangar which sits side by side with the sculpture studios. The sophisticated Snap Visualisation Lab will provide extraordinary facilities for data visualisation in architecture, design, experimental media and city design. It provides a stunning home for our new and existing research centres: the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design; the Design Age Institute, Computer Science, Materials Science, the RCA Robotics Laboratory and the Intelligent Mobility Design Centre.
The fact that the RCA has been ranked as the top art and design university in the world for the last eight years is testament to the talent, flair and skill of our staff and students – especially given our scores of 100% for academic reputation, and 96% for our reputation with employers. So is the impressive expansion of our research income from £7m to £20m in the past investment cycle (2014–21). We also know that our academic vision really resonates with businesses, who call upon us to deliver corporate consultancy work and creative partnership activity, and the philanthropic community which has generously supported student scholarships, and academic positions such as a new Chair in Innovation by the Genesis Foundation, as well as the new Battersea campus.
It’s clear that the world of post-18 education has changed permanently, accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic and the backdrop of Government legislation and expectations of the sector. There’s huge digital disruption in learning models, the urgent need to further equity and inclusion, and an appetite for flexibility in accessing education throughout our lives.
We’re seeing shifts in the global demand for UK education. At a national level, the value of the creative arts and humanities – from school through to university and postgraduate research – is under scrutiny from Government and pressure from a user-funded higher education model. Yet we also know that the UK’s future economy will be driven by innovative ideas and unconventional thinking. The UK has a strong and growing creative industries sector that, as stated in the Government’s Innovation Strategy of 2021, will play an important part in the UK’s post-Covid economic growth. There is huge and very special potential in the areas where the creative brilliance of that sector fuses with the technological innovation that is all around us. And we should never forget the cultural and social value that is always present at all levels of arts education.
In this Strategic Plan 2022–27 we’re focused on three primary goals. Firstly, research and the application of new insights to diverse global challenges. Through research, knowledge exchange and innovation, the RCA will make tangible contributions to societal challenges such as mobility and urbanism, sustainability, design for ageing populations, and design for AI.
Secondly, we’re redoubling our commitment to teaching excellence, flexible learning frameworks and putting student experience at the heart of the institution with a new enlarged Student Hub. We’ll introduce new degrees such as a professional doctorate, an MBA in creative entrepreneurship and business, and degrees in Design Robotics and Gaming.
Thirdly, we’ll go further and faster on our contribution to the economic, social and cultural fabric of the UK, not least through creative entrepreneurship, with a new £3m Design and Impact Fund to provide seed funding for RCA start-ups in InnovationRCA. We will also create new partnerships in the future of advanced manufacturing and modelling, data science and visualisation.
It was a very conscious decision on the part of the senior management and Council to place ‘Research’ as Goal 1. This does not suggest that research is of a higher priority than learning and teaching, but is designed to reflect that – in terms of sequence – research generates the new knowledge and insights that inform and contribute to advancing our teaching and curriculum, and which brings benefits to our postgraduate students in their programmes of study, as well as advancing disciplines.
We were delighted in REF2021 to have maintained a 100% research environment rating at 3*/4*. This reflects the strength of our research environment and our supportive and stimulating research culture, which has seen the number of doctoral degrees awarded during this REF period increase by 300% compared to REF2014, and our research income increase by 236%, with our four interdisciplinary research centres attracting over £10m of UKRI funding in recent years. The RCA prides itself on the creation of new knowledge and insights in art and design, and by choosing to signal Research followed by Teaching in our new Strategic Plan, we hope to underscore the special ecosystem of a postgraduate-only specialist institution.
Interwoven with these three primary goals, and true to our enthusiasm for embracing change, we have an appetite for taking calculated risks, making ‘no regret’ decisions and for entering into new transformative associations. This means making big decisions on internationalisation, a commitment to de-carbonise, on diversifying income streams while securing future Government funding, creating an estates strategy and masterplan, accelerating investment into digital systems and constantly improving our operating models.
This all will be facilitated by our values, people and culture, our advocacy, finance and investment, and our infrastructures. Information is therefore presented on these ‘enablers’. We’re committing to achieve Net Zero and will continue making progress towards becoming an anti-racist institution.
This plan rests on the foundation of attracting, supporting and retaining the best and most diverse student and staff talent, which makes our new, taught Master’s framework even more important for its inclusive, affordable and flexible approach. Additionally, we’ll commit 8% of our total expenditure annually to student support and scholarships to provide full- or part-fee support for c. 250 to 350 students, representing 8–12% of the projected future student body. Art and design education has never been more important as the world faces huge challenges around the environment, health and well-being, poverty and technology. There’s the sustainability and ethical challenges of fast fashion; or the fact that the built environment continues to be responsible for up to 40% of carbon emissions. An ageing population is living longer and increasingly faces quality-of-life issues. The Covid-19 pandemic not only ravaged the health of global populations, it took 100 million people back into extreme poverty. Digital inclusion continues to be linked to income, age and geography, and half the world still doesn’t have access to sanitation, formal housing settlements, water or the internet.
So, the world needs open, collaborative teams of artists, designers, scientists and tech innovators who can imagine a better world and then set about building it. We need the potent results that emerge from combining the rigour of scientists and the creativity of artists – and welcome the Government embedding creativity, design, enterprise and innovation into its Innovation Strategy. Our new MA will now include the hugely popular ‘Across RCA’ grand challenge as a formal credit bearing unit in the curriculum to address these global themes. And we will make the Terra Carta Design Lab, initiated by our Royal Visitor HRH The Prince of Wales and Chancellor Sir Jony Ive, a permanent fixture in the RCA calendar as we demonstrate the impact of design on the climate crisis and the collapse in biodiversity. We’ve been pleased to include case studies of our students’ work, and others, within this Strategic Plan.
Achieving our goals and ambitions will be a whole College effort. I want to thank our Council, our Chancellor Sir Jony Ive, our past Pro-Chancellor Baroness Rebuck and her successor Sir Peter Bazalgette, our hugely dedicated staff, students, researchers, innovators, alumni, partners and supporters for their contribution in recent years – especially over the past two years of growth, transformation, and of course, pandemic.