Learning for life

pictured from l to r: Hugh Tollemache, Henry Elwes, Patricia Broadfoot & Gordon McGlone

“I am delighted to sign this Memorandum of Understanding with the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust. Together we have already produced this wonderful guide to the wildlife of The Park. We welcome members of the local community who would like to visit and enjoy the campus. Universities are not scary places at all.”

Genuine words of sentiment that I was honoured to hear from Patricia Broadfoot, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Gloucestershire speaking at our breakfast meeting held in Cheltenham on Wednesday.

I have been working with a very committed top team from the University for two years to find ways in which a Wildlife Trust and a place of higher learning can find areas where together they may be more effective in partnership. The outcome of our first collaboration has been a full wildlife study of the Park and a lovely illustrated leaflet that explains its history. Few Cheltenham people know that the site was originally designed as a menagerie with a central lake in the shape of Africa!

My single biggest piece of learning from this is has been to find the huge commitment within the university to make itself accessible for learners of all ages. This is quite a change from my university days in the late 1960’s. Then only 5% of school leavers were able to study for a degree. Older people and those who had not had the advantages of a grammar school education could not easily benefit from the excitements of study and discovery.

Open public access to the campus is a first stage in helping to show that universities are very much a part of the life of the community. The Trust and the university will be developing a range of learning activities that will give access to experts for people wishing to understand environmental and wildlife subjects. Together we aim to make the natural world more immediate and relevant. This is a very necessary task, the environment needs more friends – and quickly.