Beacon Gathering Summary

The 2011 Beacon Gathering took place on 25^th May with the aim of ensuring that the momentum created by the Beacons for Public Engagement initiative was further broadened across the sector and maintained beyond the initial funding of the Beacons. It was attended by 57 people from core beacon teams, wider Beacon university staff, NCCPE staff, funders of the scheme, student representatives and community partners.

The morning looked at the issues and solutions that the Beacons have experienced over the last four years and what ‘advice’ they would want to pass on to other institutions to prevent them repeating the same unnecessary mistakes that we have. This was achieved through pair and small group work.

The main emergent themes from these activities were:

• the importance of partnerships and networks;
• the role of critical friends which could be internal or external;
• importance of working at all levels at the same time to generate culture change – not just top down or bottom up;
• working with existing culture at the same time as moving it to a new one;
• flexibility in approach.

In the plenary session to close the morning, participants were asked to consider what advice we could give other universities who wish to build their public engagement work. Important points made were:

• Resources need to be respected by academics and so need to be clear on their provenance (literature, expertise etc);
• Managers need to understand the business case for PE;
• External champions/critical friends can provide safe space for institutions to discuss engagement;
• Students (undergraduate and postgraduate) can be key practitioners;
• Allow risk taking and support learning from failure.

The afternoon used the open space method to allow important challenges that were raised in the morning and new ideas to be developed in small groups that were intended to create key actions on an individual, group and sector level, although for the last these were more recommendations for funders of universities. The main topics covered, with the main proposed action/insight, if agreed, were:

• Post Beacon networking – to specifically open up as Beacons and to invite other regional HEIs to events and training
• How to continue the move to public dialogue – need new understanding of expertise
• Measurement of PE and REF – Best engagement projects are multi-layered and have a diversity of partnerships but also are the hardest to measure
• How do we connect student volunteering and PE? – will the increase in fees make people more or less engaged?
• Developing learning in PE – explore the idea of chartered status or a quality mark for training
• How do you make engagement culture change work without becoming too internally focussed? – Culture change team focus inwards as academics and support team can and should face outwards.
• How to exchange and capitalise on knowledge generated by the Beacons – Create opportunities for people to meet for purposeful events where informal networking can lead to new projects and partnerships

The full report will be on the websites of the Beacon for Wales and the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement