Harper Adams University is the UK’s premier educational institution serving the agri-food, animal wellbeing and connected industries, recognised as a world-leading specialist provider. Our focus is on food production and technology, animal health and wellbeing, management of land and property, and their contribution to sustainable living environments for our planet’s population; we are equally committed to making the UK’s food and farming competitive in a world where we will need to compete globally.
Our education and research encompass food production and processing, animal sciences, environmental sustainability, mechanical engineering, land management and sustainable business management. We have strong relationships with companies in the UK and abroad, and with academic institutions across the world, collaborating in research and in the delivery of our courses. We are a University with regional, national and international reach and impact.
The University began life in 1901 as Harper Adams Agricultural College and was granted University status in 2012. Our Chancellor is Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal; our current Vice-Chancellor is Professor Ken Sloan, who joined us in 2021. The University has a primary campus in Shropshire, close to the old market town of Newport and within easy reach of the modern town of Telford, where the university operates a second site, at the Quad digital skills hub. Telford offers a range of housing possibilities and has excellent rail and road links to the West Midlands conurbation and beyond.
Investment of more than £50 million over the last 15 years has ensured that our campus boasts the most up-to-date teaching, research and conference facilities as well as accommodation for around 800 students. Recent additions include contemporary laboratories and a purpose-built Veterinary Education Centre for teaching and research, swiftly followed by a £500,000 refurbishment of the veterinary nursing facilities. On-campus leisure facilities include a multi-gym, sports hall, dance and aerobics studio. We are one of very few universities to have its own commercial farm: covering 494 hectares, and with facilities including a £2 million leading-edge dairy unit.
We are regarded as the UK’s highest-ranked small specialist provider for the agri-food and animal wellbeing industries, consistently producing the largest cohort of graduates for the agri-food and animal wellbeing sectors, more than 99% of whom go immediately into employment. We currently have about 3,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students, studying both full-and part-time. Our courses cover not just every stage of the food chain – from developing the machinery used to prepare land through to how food is sold and the nutrients it delivers – but also broader subjects such as general business management, automotive engineering and veterinary professions, including, since the establishment of the Harper and Keele Veterinary School in 2020, Veterinary Medicine and Surgery. We have achieved the highest ratings in Quality Assurance Agency reviews.
Our undergraduate curriculum is industry-aligned, work focused, co-developed and co-delivered with industry, rooted in partnerships with about 1,100 companies in the UK and abroad. At its heart is our Placement Year included in the majority of undergraduate programmess – a bespoke learning experience for our students, tailored to the real needs of employers. We offer a swathe of employer and philanthropically funded scholarships channelled through our Development Trust. And we support employers by providing a large range of (often bespoke) CPD courses – we have about 2,000 learners here – and with our Higher Level and Degree Apprenticeship Programmes launched in 2017. These courses enable us to address directly the skills needs of the UK’s agriculture and food industry. We reinforced this work in 2021, by establishing, with support from the NFU, Morrisons and McDonalds, our School of Sustainable Food and Farming, tasked with ensuring that the sector has the skills to enable it to deliver its 2040 Net Zero goal.
We have a strong research profile. Our work is esteemed nationally and internationally for its quality and impact, particularly in areas such as entomology, sustainable agriculture, crops, livestock nutrition, autonomous and precision farming. In the 2021 Research Excellence Framework, 60% of our research was judged to be world-leading or internationally excellent. Our research is both strategic and applied. Our strategic research tackles the inter-related challenges of food security and sustainability, focusing on the need to achieve Net Zero in agriculture and food supply chains in concert with the requirements for sustainable agriculture. We focus particularly on smart agriculture; improving soil health; sustainable land use and rural communities; reducing the impact of ruminant livestock; sustainable food systems and the circular economy, and integrated pest and disease management.
Our applied research, in collaboration with regional, national and international companies, addresses their particular needs and is an important part of our research portfolio. Student research also contributes significantly to our research output - a research project is part of all our degree courses, undergraduate and postgraduate. Our research is structured around two overarching research centres covering Crop and Environmental Science, and Animal Welfare, each containing a number of themed groups; we also have cross-cutting multidisciplinary research groups, and our Future Farm – with a focus to realise a pathway to Net Zero within wider sustainability parameters.
Harper Adams is a young university, energetic and purposeful – one that says not just ‘can do’ but ‘will do’ – ambitious and forward-looking. We are an optimistic, pragmatic and collaborative community, facing challenges with confidence, ready to grasp new opportunities. We aim, by 2030, to combine being regarded as the UK’s leading specialist institution and an internationally recognised university for food production animal health and wellbeing and their contribution to sustainable living environments for the world’s population.
Our Vice-Chancellor, Professor Ken Sloan, has recently led a revision of our Strategy to take us up to 2030: this sets out how we can achieve this ambition by focusing on goals of inclusion, community, influence and sustainability. It charts a path that offers both opportunities and challenges – a pioneering journey that involves our whole Harper Adams’ community, one to which everyone working to make a difference belongs.