Liverpool is investing £200 million to improve its 100-acre precinct for a student population that has reached 22,000.

The dozen projects include a £19-million library scheme, a £36-million restructuring of the Faculty of Engineering, and the transformation of the redbrick Victoria Building into a public gallery and museum during Liverpool’s year as the Capital of Culture, in 2008.

A new headquarters building houses a one-stop shop for student services and sports facilities have been renovated and extended.

A new small animal teaching hospital opened in 2007, bringing all veterinary science clinical teaching onto one site.

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Development

A £50-million fundraising drive aims to establish world-class centres of excellence in management, law, medicine, engineering, veterinary science and architecture. The university is continuing to modernise its portfolio of courses while preserving a well-established reputation for research.

Liverpool is among the top 15 recipients of research funds, with outside income increasing dramatically in recent years. And there has been substantial investment in new educational technology, helping to cope with the demands of extra undergraduates. The main library is now open 24 hours and the top-rated medical school has also been expanded to take another 50 medics and 32 dentists, who will train at Lancaster and Central Lancashire universities respectively.

The university has been awarded a national centre of excellence to develop professionalism in medical students. Fulltime numbers throughout the university are almost exactly balanced between the sexes. A series of excellent ratings in the early teaching assessments took time to repeat, but philosophy, veterinary science, medicine and physics all achieved perfect scores. Veterinary students were the most satisfied in the country in the National Student Survey published in 2007.

Physiology, mechanical engineering and English recorded 5* ratings for research in the last Research Assessment Exercise, when more than half of the academics entered for assessment were in departments placed in one of the top two categories. There has been considerable investment in the recruitment of worldrenowned academics in advance of the next assessments in 2008, with a particular focus on chemistry.

International

Liverpool prides itself on strength across the board and opened a new university in Suzhou, China, in partnership with Xi’an Jiatong University, in 2006. Liverpool is popular with international students, 93 per cent of whom say they would recommend Liverpool to their friends. Applications from home and overseas were up by more than 10 per cent in 2007, but the university suffered more than most from the switch from six choices per applicant to five for courses beginning in 2008. New courses for 2009 include Irish studies and politics and a combined diploma in dental hygiene and therapy.

One of Europe’s largest facilities for training dentists opened in 2007, marking the start of a £6-million investment programme following the award of another 125 dental places from 2009. Liverpool was among the first traditional universities to run access courses for adults without traditional academic qualifications.

Access

The projected dropout rate of nearly 9 per cent is below the national average for the courses and entry grades. Even before the introduction of top-up fees, the university was awarding record numbers of scholarships and bursaries to widen opportunities further. They include five in memory of the Hillsborough disaster victims and thirty in memory of John Lennon, mainly for Merseyside residents.

Other access initiatives include a week-long summer school and the opening of a purpose-built children’s centre to help mature students and staff, with 68 subsidised places. The proportion of state-educated students is higher than at the other civic universities and nearly a quarter of the undergraduates are from working-class homes.

Student scene

Both the university and the city have a loyal following among students, and Liverpool’s status as Capital of Culture should add to the attractions. The 3,357 places in halls of residence, self-catering flats and houses are more than enough to guarantee accommodation to all first years. The suburban setting of the main halls complex and the focus of social life on the guild of students means that there is less integration than at some other civic universities, but there is no shortage of nightlife.

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