The Birmingham Graduate Attributes - A Call to Action

Professor Tom Harrison, Deputy Director – Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues (School of Education) introduces the re-launch of the refreshed Graduate Attributes.  You can find a full list of the Graduate Attributes on this dedicated website. In the coming months, the Graduate Attributes will be further introduced to both academic and professional services staff, who will be encouraged and supported to engage with them in a range of ways - with a view to engaging students in relation to their own development. In due course, the aim is for the Graduate Attributes, under the heading of ‘UoB and Beyond: Your Graduate Attributes’, to be embedded across the student experience and thus support our articulation of the broad, far-reaching value of higher education.

Professor Harrison also comments:

“In my research I have found educators at all levels understand that they have some responsibility to help their students develop qualities of character. They see it as part and parcel of a good education – one that contributes to individual and societal flourishing. Moreover, they push back against an overly instrumentalised view of higher education – a view that education has been reduced to only focussing on metrics such as attainment grades and NSS results. Focussing on the Graduate Attributes is about our professional relationships with students, taking into account their individual nature and qualities – this Is why character is often better measured qualitatively than quantitatively.” 

 

FURTHER RESOURCES

You can find a full list of the Graduate Attributes on this dedicated website.