The Birmingham Graduate Attributes; A Call to Action - Transcript

Martin Luther King famously said intelligence plus character is the true purpose of education.  At the University of Birmingham, we offer our students a world class education.  This means we must focus on how we are helping our students develop knowledge but also essential human qualities like resilience and practical wisdom – the ability to make the right decision at the right time. 

This year we launch the revised Birmingham Graduate Attributes, a list of 15 qualities that we should all be helping our students to cultivate. 

The approaches we adopt inside and outside the curriculum to help our students develop the graduate attributes might be different – but we know students’ lives now and in the future demand that they possess attributes such as creativity, inclusivity, digital literacy and social responsibility.  After all, it is the qualities of our graduates alongside our research – so, knowledge and people - that make transformative differences in local, national, and international communities.

The big question is how we might go about supporting students to cultivate the Graduate Attributes?  The relaunch is designed to raise the profile of the graduate attributes but also initiate discussions about what we are doing to help our students cultivate them? How do we make them a planned, conscious, and reflective part of the teaching and support we offer all students.  

I’m really looking forward to having these conversations with colleagues about these important questions in the coming weeks and months.