2023-2028 Strategic plan

Introduction

The School of International Relations is vibrant, diverse and successful. We are consistently ranked top in the UK in International Relations/Politics by the Guardian and Times, and score particularly well when it comes to student satisfaction in the NSS. We are committed educators, determined to challenge and learn with our students through research-led teaching of the highest order. We are committed researchers, determined to produce high-quality outputs of different types, and research that can have sustained impact from the largest IGOs, to local community groups. We are committed colleagues, who make sure that the school runs properly and who take part in a wide range of organizations with an international relations focus from around the world.

The School’s strategic priorities, discussed below, align closely with the University’s Strategy (2022-2027). We believe that now and in the future we are and will be one of the most important centers for International Relations teaching and research in the world. We put the highest priority on nurturing and growing our diverse community. We consider issues of sustainability to be vital to the long-term health of the global community and are growing our expertise in this area. As one of the first schools to pioneer digitally delivered programs, we believe we are well-placed to partake in the university’s growing digital presence.

To best understand how we want to maintain and improve our excellence, while adding new strengths in research and teaching, we have divided up the strategy into three subcategories: Research and Impact, Teaching, People.

Research and impact strategy

One of the greatest strengths of the school is that we have expertise across the board in many different elements of International Relations. We have theorists, area specialists, philosophers, economists, international historians and comparativists. We also have experts in almost all regions of the world. Some members of the school work with the largest IGOs and nation states while others do extensive grass-roots engagement and research/impact work with local governments and communities. We believe that the variety of our work is of great value, and our aim going forward is to help foster an even more positive research culture in the school to help further such engagements. As part of our plan to further improve our research culture, we aim to support staff in the production of internationally outstanding research outputs and to encourage impact production from staff in all our areas of expertise. We have thus devised an overall Research Strategy to go along with a specific Impact Strategy.

Research strategy

Our research strategy is driven by three underlying objectives:

Creating a world leading School of International Relations that can play a key role in advancing knowledge through research to address global challenges in socially responsible ways
Developing sustainable collaborations with strategic partners (national and global) that are interdisciplinary across a broad range of research fields.
Making sure that we remain a broad church intellectually, with strengths in many different areas and methodologies.
Extending the reach of our research through engagement and impact.

This is how we see ourselves attaining these objectives:

Growing our capacity for research excellence in the school. We have been doing this with the recent appointment of three permanent ERF Lectureships. These were advertised for any field with a stress on research excellence with the ability to translate that excellence into impact, and we received more than 300 applications. We will continue to make targeted and strategic appointments at the Professorial level, taking into account both the needs for research excellence and maintaining a spread of talent in all areas of IR. Along with these strategic appointments, we will increase the number of postdoctoral fellows, PGR students, and grant applications. In order to grow the postdoctoral community in the School, we will encourage fellowship applications and increase the number of large grant applications with postdocs included in them.
Focussing on key performance indicators. These include improving positioning in REF2028 (i.e., across the new elements of People, Culture and Environment; Contribution to Knowledge and Understanding; and Engagement and Impact); conducting annual research reviews with all colleagues; organising an annual Research Away Day for the School that exclusively focuses on research and related matters; increasing the total number of postdocs in the School.
Encouraging and supporting the development of medium- and large-sized collaborative research grants. We will work with our research institutes and centres to enhance their scope in terms of interdisciplinary and collaborative research (within the School, across the University, and externally). We will dedicate a part of the School Research Seminar series to focus exclusively on issues relating to interdisciplinarity.
Exploring opportunities for collaborative project with the new Business School. As we will be re-housed in a few years with the Business School in the New College Development, the school will encourage staff members to explore collaborative projects on all levels with members of the Business School. This could be done, for instance, in support of staff working in International Political Economy, Sustainable Development, or Strategy and Leadership.
Establishing a special fund, with university support, called the Research Assistance Support Package (RASP), to provide groups in the school with additional funds to support the publication of internationally excellent outputs and the creation of impact-narrative level impact.
Key performance indicators: increasing the number of medium- and large-sized grant applications and awards since the last REF; the holding of annual grant writing workshops and ‘support groups’.
Explore more scholarship opportunities for our PGR students, in conjunction with the University and St Leonard’s College; this may involve scholarship packages which include tutoring as a requirement with pre-allocated pots of funding for conferences and research. The School will continue to support staff-PGR collaboration and knowledge exchange through our weekly staff-research seminars. We will continue successful initiatives such as the annual Methods Café and writing retreat, which enhance PGR contributions to the School’s research culture. Additionally, we will facilitate greater recruitment from PGT into PGR through PGR information and application workshops.

Impact strategy

Our specifically Impact focused strategy is driven by these two underlying objectives:

Assisting all staff, no matter what their field, to see impact as part of their research endeavors.
Putting in place lasting school efforts to make sure our impact efforts are supported and recorded as we move into REF 2028 and the next.

This is how we see ourselves reaching these objectives:

Encouraging Interdisciplinarity in our impact creation. Members of the School draw on a wide range of academic disciplines in their research and teaching. This interdisciplinarity extends to the development and cultivation of Impact activities. Indeed, one of the School’s strengths is its ability not only to bridge divides between academic disciplines, but to foster linkages with external stakeholders from diverse professional, geographical, and socio-economic backgrounds. For example, Impact case studies currently under development involve actors from Africa, Europe, and Latin America (among others) with underpinning research inspired by academic disciplines including developmental studies, history, international relations, political science, sociology, and strategic studies – to name but a few.
Supporting priority areas. The School of IR has a long and distinguished reputation for research and policy engagement, with particular emphasis on (inter alia) core University priorities of peace, conflict and security; cultural understanding; and sustainability. Colleagues are developing promising long-term engagement and impact initiatives within and across these priority areas. As we prepare for REF 2028, School leadership is actively working to align our draft (and later, final) Impact case studies with these University priorities.
Establishing and supporting Strategic partnerships. The School aims to promote Impact as a fundamental component of a broader commitment to fostering collaborative research and engagement within Scotland, the UK, and internationally. To this end, the School will seek to build on existing relationships and develop new strategic partnerships with stakeholders including governments, local authorities, intergovernmental organisations, non-governmental organisations and civil society, and the public. These relationships, in turn, are central to our development of engagement and impact initiatives including Impact case studies.
Supporting entrepreneurial efforts leading to Impact: Members of the School of IR already conduct influential contract research and consulting for a range of organisations including UK government ministries and international organisations. As with strategic partnerships, these relationships will inform the cultivation of research and impact culture within the School as a whole and will inform the development of Impact case studies (and the narrative component) for REF 2028. This is another area of possible interdisciplinary work with the new Business School.
Support Impact through the creation of RASP.

Teaching strategy

The School of International Relations prides itself for having an excellent track record in national league tables, including the annual NSS. In 2023, the School was ranked first nationally both in the Guardian’s UK university rankings and the Sunday Times league table, a position we have inhabited most years over the past decade. These results attest to high levels of student satisfaction, which in turn is a reflection of the importance we as a School place on the delivery of world-leading and research-led teaching. While league tables are volatile and do not always provide a fully accurate picture of the quality of teaching and learning that goes on in any one department, our goal is to maintain our standing in the national league tables as one of the UK’s top places to study International Relations.

Our teaching and learning strategy is informed by five underlying objectives:

Maintaining learning and teaching standards that are of the highest quality;
Maintaining a low staff-to-student ratio, which allows us to keep our class sizes small, thus enabling closer and more consistent staff-student interaction and greater levels of academic support;
Providing our students a curriculum that offers both depth and breadth, particularly at Honours level, and ensure that our curriculum is inclusive and diverse;
Testing our students through a broad range of both traditional as well as innovative forms of assessments and ensure we provide our students with feedback that is both timely and meaningful/constructive;
Ensuring our intended learning outcomes support the development of graduate attributes.

This is how we see ourselves reaching these objectives:

Continuing to attract some of the best and brightest students, whether from Scotland and the UK, or indeed from around the world. Our highly international student body is a reflection of the emphasis we place on delivering a curriculum that is, in its truest sense, global, diverse, and inclusive. Our aim, moreover, is to ensure that teaching and learning within the School enables our students, no matter their educational or social background, to hone the intellectual, professional and personal skills and attributes they need to equip them with the strongest graduate prospects possible.
Continuing to support the School’s vibrant Teaching forum, which has become our most active and creative group to share and develop new practices to improve our research-led teaching.
Making strategic appointments that enrich our existing depth and breadth of coverage, address gaps in the curriculum that may arise (e.g. through the departure or retirement of existing faculty), and open up avenues both for innovation and for interdisciplinary collaboration in our curriculum across all levels.
Reviewing our curriculum as well as our teaching and assessment practices to ensure also that they remain relevant, rigorous, and of the highest quality while at the same time taking into consideration key areas of strategic concern both to our students and to the university, including questions of diversity and inclusion and sustainability.
Reflecting on our practices and procedures to ensure we are supporting our students from under-represented and disadvantaged backgrounds, e.g. BAME students as well as those coming to us through the Widening Participation route.
Building on our past and current experience of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) to identify areas of best practice in the delivery of teaching and assessment and explore ways of using TEL to improve the research skills and digital literacy of our students, thereby boosting their graduate attributes and employability.
Engaging in conversations within the School and with the wider University and beyond, to identify ways in which to address the significant challenges posed to our teaching and assessment practices by Large Language Models/AI tools such as ChatGPT.
Encouraging and enable our students and staff to engage with the University’s initiatives for fostering entrepreneurial learning, e.g. the Vertically Integrated Projects or Enterprise Education.
Keeping student needs in mind by working with the careers service to enhance employability skills and increase the offering for internships for all our students.
Exploring avenues of innovation especially as relates to flexible and digital learning, especially at the taught postgraduate level.
Exploring avenues of pedagogical collaboration with the Business School with which we will soon share a new home (the New College), e.g. in the development of short courses in the form of executive education.
The School is committed to bringing the present online certificate program in TPV entirely in house, and to combine it with the online MLitt in TPV as a fully school/university run digital offering.
Building on this, the school should soon start delivering its only digital offerings, including a certificate program in TPV.

Key performance indicators of success in the above areas will include:

Maintaining our standing among the top 5 places to study International Relations in the national league tables;
A rise in the number of applicants all while maintaining our rigorous entry standards.
A commitment to increasing staff numbers if student numbers rise.
Maintaining high overall rates of retention into Honours.
Continued evidence of our graduates finding employment within 15 months of leaving.
Establishing functioning and popular digital programs during the period of this strategy.

People strategy

Everything that we hope to achieve going forward in research, impact and teaching, is built upon appointing and supporting the people who work in the school at all levels. It is impossible, for instance, to create the kind of research culture that we wish to create if people do not feel supported in that endeavor and we have not appointed people who wish to play an active role in that culture. Likewise we cannot expect to maintain our high teaching standards if colleagues are not supported in their pedagogical efforts. Finally, we believe that the school’s efforts to create a sustainable future is best done through a constant dialogue between staff about best practice in areas such as research and travel. Our People Strategy is therefore constructed to assist colleagues in ways that will specifically result in the strategic Research and Teaching aspirations we have mentioned above:

Our People strategy is informed by three underlying objectives.

Ensuring transparency and fairness in workloads, so that all staff members feel the work of the school is shared equally according to contract.
To make sure that the New College Development is undertaken with the best interests of the research and teaching needs of the school in the forefront.
To make sure that school resources are allocated in the best possible ways to assist staff in their research and teaching development and achievement.

This is how we see ourselves achieving these objectives:

Continuing with the establishment and empowerment of the school’s new Workload Committee. The school has recently set-up a new workload committee, chaired by the Deputy Head, to refresh the school’s workload model. Having done this, the committee will now move into a coordination role, sorting through all workload questions for the coming years and plan long-term administrative responsibilities for members of staff.
Keeping EDI issues at the forefront of our hiring and promotion processes, to help make our community more diverse and vibrant at all levels and in all areas. As part of this we are preparing our application for an Athena-Swan bronze award. In the future we will discuss going forward with an application to silver.
Playing an active role advising the University on the New College project. The school has appointed a diverse team to represent its voice to the New College Project, including HoS, Deputy Head, DoR, DoT, DoW and School Manager. This team will work to make sure that the new building has the needs of the school, both staff and students, are well understood.
Maintaining a regular series of events to specifically support members of the school meet their research and teaching goals. As we are a very large school, we want to guarantee that we hold some events which can bring us all together as a community. These will include one annual distinguished research lecture and one annual distinguished teaching lecture. We will also plan for annual or biannual away days.
Endeavouring to expend school resources equitably and to assist staff. This will include both maintaining individual Research and Teaching Support Accounts (RTAs) for staff on both Research/Teaching and Education Focussed Contracts and maintaining support for our different research centres and institutes.
Ensuring a continuing school dialogue on sustainability questions. The school will be playing an active role in the University’s new sustainability committee and through that we hope to improve dialogue within the school on sustainability issues.
Supporting and growing our strategic partnerships such as with the Universities of Bonn, Padua, William & Mary, to foster and deepen our pedagogical and research exchange opportunities.
Examining our provision for staff monitoring and development so that all members of the school feel they are supported in the best possible way to develop their careers.

Key performance indicators for our people strategy include:

High staff retention rates, in particular losing few if any staff to other universities in sideways moves.
Continuing to attract the best possible applicant pools for our open positions.
Making sure that promotions and hires reflect the diversity of the school’s make up.
Exploring more strategic partnerships for staff and students, particularly outside of Europe and North America.