Brighton came of age as one of the first new universities to be awarded a medical school, but is equally well known for imaginative initiatives in its region.

It has set up a centre in Hastings and runs a number of schemes, both to draw people from the region into higher education and to help them with practical problems.

The £28.5-million medical school, which is run jointly with neighbouring Sussex University, is training 128 doctors a year and has now proved its popularity with applicants.

Brighton was already heavily engaged in other health subjects, such as nursing and midwifery. The medical school’s headquarters, on Brighton’s Falmer campus, has also provided a new base for applied social sciences, such as criminology and applied psychology, which are among the university’s most sought-after degrees.

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Partnership

The two universities have been collaborating since Brighton was a polytechnic. There is a joint research building for science policy and management studies, and a joint accord guarantees the offer of a place to all suitably qualified applicants from the Channel Island of Jersey.

Brighton does the same for applicants from Sussex and leads a Learning Network for the county. Almost a third of undergraduates now come through these accords.

Research

Brighton was again one of the top new universities in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise. Art and design produced the best results, with two-thirds of the work submitted considered world-leading or internationally excellent.

Business management, sports studies and mechanical and aeronautical engineering also did well. Teacher training, physiotherapy and architecture, building and planning achieved the best scores in the latest National Student Survey. The plaudits have not gone unnoticed: applications were up by almost 10 per cent at the start of 2009, the latest in a series of impressive figures.

Brighton’s strengths in art and design – recognised in the award of national teaching centres in design and creativity – have been at the forefront of the university’s rise.

But the university also has a growing reputation in areas such as sport and hospitality, as well as scoring well in teacher education rankings. It was the first university to achieve an 'outstanding' rating from the Office for Standards in Education for management and quality assurance across the full range of primary, secondary and post-compulsory teacher education courses.

Facilities

The Design Council’s national archive is lodged on campus, and the four-year fashion textiles degree offers work placements in the United States, France and Italy, as well as Britain.

Four sites house the five faculties. Art and Design has the prime location opposite the Royal Pavilion, with sports science, service management and the health professions at Eastbourne and the other subjects on the outskirts of Brighton, at Falmer and Moulsecoomb, the university’s headquarters, where work has started on a new building for education, languages, literature and communication.

Over £100 million has been spent on new facilities and refurbishment since university status arrived in 1992 and another £100 million has been committed for the next three years, half of it on student accommodation and learning facilities.

Existing facilities include a flight simulator, a fully functional news room for the university’s sports journalists, modern clinical skills laboratories for pharmacy, and a custom-designed culinary arts studio. At Eastbourne there is a new library and extensive sports and leisure facilities, including a sports centre with three gymnasia and a dance studio, a refurbished swimming pool and fitness facilities.

Sport-science laboratories and 354 en-suite residential places have been added and improvements made to the learning resources centre, lecture theatres and refectory. The extensive modernisation of the Falmer campus continues, with a £23m building for biosciences due to open in 2010.

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