Many of our initiatives combine all of our workstreams, informing and supporting our members while also providing a springboard for networking events and guiding our representations to decision makers on behalf of our members. Click on each of the tabs below to see some of our campaign highlights:
Be part of our engineering R&D advocacy campaign to put Engineering Academics Network member projects on the political map.
Learn more here.
Addressing inequality and exclusion from engineering education of those who are wired to think differently calls for more than just a research project, instead we seek momentum for a movement. The EPC’s track record in thought leadership and our unique position to empower and amplify the knowledge skills and experiences of the Engineering Academics Network inspires us in our campaign: All in for Engineering. Read on and view our campaign page here.
In June 2024, we co-hosted a ‘Co-Designing a Neuro-inclusive Future’ event with the Dyson Institute. At the event, we brought together teams from more than 10 different universities to start to define a neuro-inclusion maturity framework for engineering education. By the end of the day, we had identified the domains that would be in such a framework and have started to populate the extremities in such a framework. We agreed next steps, and above, all have established a productive co-design approach where different people are treated as equal members in the design process, recognising that relevant experience and expertise lies in many different places. We wanted students to be meaningful collaborators in this work – thinking about this with them rather than for them, so we brought together students, professional services colleagues, and academics from the very beginning. We have now established a steering group and panel, using Delphi methodology to arrive at consensus. Work continues during Spring 2025.
In July, we co-hosted a webinar to move the work forward and include those who prefer to engage in a different way to the approach used so far. We shared back what happened at the co-design event, completed another co-design activity, and continued building a community of people who want to see engineering education become more inclusive. This has produced four development groups to support the collection of supporting material, on authentic voice, definitions, resources and assessment. These groups are meeting up again on 28th March to progress this important work.
In January 2025, our assessment development group partnered with the UK & Ireland Engineering Education Research Network to lead a discussion on assessment practice and the experience of neurodiverse students. At this on-line event, a panel of academics explored aspects of assessment practice that we are aware will potentially discriminate against neurodiverse students being able to reach their full potential as they seek to enter an engineering career to shine a light on examples of good practice. The group is now planning an assessment workshop in summer 2025.
Meanwhile, you may have seen our series of blogs for Neurodiversity week 2024.
As always, many thanks to members who completed this year’s EPC engineering enrolments survey. The survey gives us all an early temperature check of the health of HE undergraduate and postgraduate engineering enrolments and provides early signals to changing patterns of enrolments. Our survey is the only place you can gain this insight, long before official sector enrolment data for 2024/25 is available, especially at postgraduate level. With engineering more reliant than most on overseas enrolments, all eyes are on international rectuitment and postgraduate recruitment in particular; this is insight available nowhere else.
Last year’s survey provided early signals of a contracting overseas market in First degree engineering in 2022, with an influx of overseas postgraduates continuing an upward trend since at least the 2019 survey. Considering the full sample this year, overseas postgraduate enrolments appear to be down by around 7% from the average accross the last 2 years. When asked about higher or lower enrolments specifically, respondents reported a decline in overseas enrolments across most disciplines overall.
Our surveys consistently show that Russell Group universities dominate the overseas postgraduate cohort, and our 2024 survey shows that Russell Group providers are witnessing the largest decline in Overseas students. Our survey has returned to its typical pattern of a marginal skew towards non-Russell group, which may suggest we will see an even more pronounced swing when the full HESA student data collection becomes available in 2026.
Non-Russell Group engineering appears most stable overall in 2024, which nods to the lesser reliance on overseas enrolments. The pattern of Undergraduate overseas market is similar to previous years and appears to be holding in our sample. Most disciplines report increases in Home enrolments since last year. But with a larger Russell group increase in home students compensating for the starker overseas decline, this is one to watch.
These results and trends by discipline are now showcased in our amazing Data explorer service which provides you, our members, the opportunity to access and explore the findings through dynamic and flexible data visualisations. Using this exclusive service, you can drill down and dissect results by specific cohorts, filter to your own discipline(s) of interest and view charts, tables and data personalised to your needs. And, for the first time this year, we have included the data for previous surveys. EAN members can also view the lauch slide deck and the lauch webinar recording via this article.
Please remember that this is a survey – not a data collection – but with around half of EPC member providers submitting a response we celebrate coverage of c28K students accross more discrete disciplines (222) than ever before.
It is essential that we ensure new graduates are both motivated and well-equipped to address the pressing sustainability challenges impacting our environment and society.
As part of a major initiative to ensure the engineers of tomorrow can rise to the challenges of the climate emergency, the Engineering Professors’ Council (EPC), with partners The Royal Academy of Engineering and Siemens Digital Industries Software, created the Sustainability Toolkit as part of the profession’s continued efforts to integrate and embed greener / sustainable practices into engineering education and the Academy’s wider Engineers 2030 project.
The Sustainability Toolkit is a free set of resources aimed at assisting educators in incorporating sustainability into the education, curriculum, and development of all engineers. This initiative is essential in using engineering to address global challenges, driving impactful solutions that benefit both society and the environment.
The toolkit contains ready-made materials that are in alignment with Accreditation of Higher Education Programme 4 (AHEP4) criteria, which are the requirements for courses to obtain professional accreditation. The resources are also mapped to The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s Sustainability Development Goals (UNESCO’s SDGs) and Engineers Without Borders’ (EWB’s) Reimagined Degree Map Interventions.
The Sustainability Toolkit serves as a valuable resource for educators working in engineering higher education to address the immediate and critical need to enhance sustainability awareness and skills, particularly within Engineering education. The toolkit includes 12 guidance articles, 18 different teaching resources (see here and here), including 5 case studies, and a library of links to sustainability communities and networks that promote collaborative efforts. Additionally, the toolkit directs users to our Sustainability Resources Library (a library of open-source supplementary engineering education materials). The Sustainability Toolkit also features a variety of insightful guest blogs, which you can explore here.
The toolkit is organised into four distinct categories: Knowledge tools – A collection of resources designed to help users enhance their knowledge or find additional information. Guidance tools – As set of tools aimed to provide guidance on how to utilise methods and learn how to implement sustainability concepts. Teaching tools – A set of tools aimed at helping users understand what to integrate / what to implement in their practices. Collaboration resources – A range of resources that enable users to connect with and support others. In developing the resources for the EPC’s Sustainability Toolkit, we took into account recent scholarship and best practices and reviewed existing material available on sustainability in engineering. You can find links to these open-source online resources in our ever-growing library of engineering education resources in our Sustainability Resources Library.
We plan to commence Phase 2 of the Sustainability Toolkit very soon to further enhance the toolkit by developing more resources, expanding our reach, creating a Sustainability Toolkit community, forming a network of reviewers and much much more! If you would like to support Phase 2 of the Sustainability Toolkit, please see here for more details.
In the meantime, we are continuing to add to our Sustainability campaign with resources for the Toolkit, such as personal blogs and frequently updating our Sustainability Resources Library. If you have any open-source links to online engineering education resources that you’d like to share, please feel free to send them to us, and we will add them to our library. If you would like to submit a blog, please do get in touch.
The ability to tell right from wrong, and better from worse, is as vital to an engineer as maths or design skills, yet many UK higher education institutions fall short in effectively developing these abilities in future engineering professionals.
As part of the profession’s on-going work to embed ethical practice into the culture of engineering, the EPC, with support from the Royal Academy of Engineering, has created the Engineering Ethics Toolkit: a resource that addresses the issue that relatively few university engineering courses explicitly embed ethics teaching throughout the curriculum.
The Engineering Ethics Toolkit aims to engage educators, and enable them to introduce ethics into the education and training of every engineer, allowing the UK to position itself as a leader in promoting engineering as a force to improve the world for people and the planet.
As well as offering advice to educators who want to teach ethics but are not sure where to begin, the Toolkit features ready-to-use classroom resources that are rooted in educational best practice and align with the Accreditation of Higher Education Programmes (AHEP) criteria, which are the conditions for courses to receive professional accreditation.
These case studies and other teaching materials highlight current and emerging real-world issues and can be used and adapted by anyone. The latest additions to the Engineering Ethics Toolkit include the interactive Ethics Explorer, which helps educators understand, plan for and implement ethics learning, and 30 new academic guidance articles, case studies and comprehensive classroom activities created and developed by academic and industry professionals.
In addition to the Toolkit, we have recently launched Ethics Ambassadors – a new community of practice aimed at championing the embedding of ethics within engineering.
We continue to develop our Engineering Ethics campaign with further resources for the Toolkit, such as an Educators’ Pack, a new search tool, and further core content, as well as incentivising educators to embed ethics into engineering with a competition and awards.
Drawing on the report, we held a live members webcast to explore the findings, featuring a keynote by Sir Michael Barber, then Chair of the Office for Students. We explored assessment; collaboration and professional skills; remote laboratory work and practical skill development; employability; and student partnership in learning design. Our timing was great too, as just a few days before Sir Michael was commissioned to conduct a review of government delivery to “ensure it remains focused, effective and efficient”.
The lessons of Emerging Stronger have also been fed into the OfS Government-commissioned call for evidence on digital learning that led to Gravity Assist: Propelling higher education towards a brighter future (which included a direct quotation from the EPC). We highlighted the ways engineering higher education has innovated digital teaching and how we can make the most of this exceptional progress in the future and presented three priorities for the engineering HE sector:
- Facilitating agreement threshold expectations in relation to digital poverty as it applies to engineering education
- Promoting conceptions of resilient learning and teaching
- Providing a pipeline of ‘high-quality’ digital learning resources, for purposes of benchmarking and inspiration.
