Policy@Manchester
Policy@Manchester is our University’s sector-leading policy engagement institute.
It connects researchers with policymakers and influencers, nurturing long-term policy engagement partnerships and impact.
Directory of activities
Search these pages to explore a selection of our directory of activities. You can use the keyword search and filter buttons to discover how we are addressing each of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals and the five priorities in our Social Responsibility and Civic Engagement Plan. You can also filter activities by location and function.
searching subjects: Social inclusion
We partner with a range of organisations to carry out meaningful public engagement with diverse audiences and share ideas and research as well as inspiring informed discussion, debate and creativity. Examples include:
We partner with small local charities in Manchester right through to major government departments through our Q-Step programme. This places students on internships in organisations that require data skills and analysis and we’ve collaborated on projects with the Office for National Statistics on global, national and regional datasets used to measure progress on SDGs.
We’re committed to empowering students with the knowledge, skills and opportunities to address all of the SDGs through partnerships with public, private and civil society organisations. Our University Living Lab platform connects student projects with external organisations to address the SDGs. Our Volunteer Hub acts to advance partnerships between hundreds of charities and our student volunteers. And many academic programmes offer service-learning partnerships, where external organisations benefit from practical student interventions in areas such as dentistry, optometry, pharmacy, business and legal advice.
Our Justice Hub allows students to explore and apply various arms of the law to make real change in our communities. The Hub runs a free legal advice centre for economically disadvantaged people in areas such as family, housing and immigration law. During the pandemic, our Justice Hub set up the Virtual Vacation Scheme, which aimed to simplify some very complicated areas of law impacted by the pandemic, and created an accessible and informative method of legal help for the community through workshops, videos, briefings and webinars.
In Place of War (IPOW) is a global spin-out charity from research in our School of Music and Drama. IPOW works with grassroots organisations in refugee camps, war-affected villages, towns under curfew, cities under occupation, and refugee communities, using creativity in places of conflict as a proven tool for positive change. IPOW enables communities and grassroots change-makers in music, theatre and across the arts to transform a culture of violence and suffering into hope, opportunity and freedom.
As part of our Justice Hub, The Manchester Innocence Project (MIP) is one of only 13 organisations outside of the US to join the Innocence Network. Law students volunteering with MIP have the opportunity to take on live criminal appeals for those who maintain their innocence.
The Whitworth created the UK’s first dedicated post of Cultural Park Keeper. This has led to the creation of a Natural and Cultural Health Service programme of outdoor activities to raise awareness, educate and inspire our diverse visitors to connect with and protect life in our park. At Jodrell Bank we work with community and voluntary groups, including the RSPB and the Cheshire Beekeepers Association, to protect and enhance our natural environment.
A renowned engagement expert from our School of Environment, Education and Development is using her Ketso Connect community and stakeholder engagement toolkit to help the government’s Natural England advisers launch their National Recovery Network. This network aims to restore 75% of protected sites and to create or restore 500,000 hectares of additional wildlife-rich habitat. The project is piloting public and civic engagement models with local libraries across Manchester.
We’ve become the first higher education institution in the UK to adopt the Social Value Portal, the leading online tool that helps organisations prioritise and measure their social value when they procure, or pay for, major services.
We recognise there are barriers for some of our students in accessing appropriate work experience. We offer financial support for full-time undergraduates of all years to undertake career-enhancing work experience for those who otherwise couldn’t have afforded it.
Our Work and Equalities Institute is providing the evidence base to inform global employment debates and policies. Research in three key areas is undertaken: minimum wage and collective bargaining; the gender pay gap; and precarious work. This work is shaping guidance produced by international policy bodies and national policies of multiple countries, and is also providing evidence for European trade unions in their interactions with EU and national policymakers.
Our Equality and Diversity Policy prevents discrimination based on gender and/or sex. Our Dignity at Work and Study Policy covers harassment and discrimination against women. Our Report and Support system addresses alleged cases of bullying, sexual harassment or discrimination.
Our Gender Pay Gap report measures differences between the average (mean and median) earnings of men and women who work at our university. The median gender pay gap (GPG) is 11.8%, while the mean is 17.2%, which is caused by the under-representation of women in senior roles. We therefore aim to increase the number of women who are senior lecturers, readers and professors (currently 32%) until they are representative of the pool of women at lecturer level (currently 47%).
We recognise and value unpaid care and domestic work, which can often fall disproportionately on women. We therefore strive to provide a range of policies and schemes that promote shared caring and domestic responsibilities. These include our Parental Leave policies, provision of our two subsidised campus nurseries, and our new policy to trial hybrid working, which will support greater inclusion and flexibility for our staff.
We have a range of initiatives that empower women and girls to enter predominantly male fields such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Our academics have set up ScienceGrrl – a grassroots network to address the under-representation of women in science and engineering. A Women in Environmental Science group has been established to create space for environmental discussion among women from diverse backgrounds. We also host Girls Night Out – a twice-yearly event at our Jodrell Bank Discovery Centre to celebrate and encourage females to pursue careers in STEM. In partnership with the Manchester United Foundation, our Girls in STEM Day programme invites 12- and 13-year-old girls to campus to celebrate National Engineering Day.
We work in collaboration with Association des Guides du Rwanda (AGR) to provide volunteer opportunities for students to help girls and young women in Rwanda acquire skills for their development and become agents of positive change.
Our students started a Misogyny Is Hate campaign, leading to the government directing police to record crimes motivated by a person’s sex or gender for the first time. Our Students’ Union also runs Reclaim the Night, resulting in around 2,000 women marching in the streets each year to raise awareness of sexual harassment and gender-based violence.
Gender equality is embedded across our whole curriculum, and a wide range of our degrees offer course units on gender and sexuality. For examples, Religion and Theology students assess the impact of changing gender roles on religious traditions, while our MA in Gender, Sexuality and Culture brings together scholars from many different fields to explore feminist and queer theory, sexual identities and gender history.
We produced On Gender to identify what we know – and what we need to know – about gender inequality in tackling the big policy agendas devolved to Greater Manchester and other areas, with devolution deals in areas such as ageing, labour markets, education, parenting and sexual violence.
Our research into agriculture and apparel sectors in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and collaboration with three large UK retailers, has led to more than 390,000 workers in value chains in low- and middle-income countries directly benefiting from the implementation of gender-equitable strategies. More than a million workers have been indirectly advantaged through opportunities for women to advance to leadership positions and new strategies from companies that have the potential to reach 33 million workers in 180 countries.
Our University Library is one of only five National Research Libraries in the UK. It offers reference facilities to north-west sixth-form and mature students and their teachers to help with A-level, vocational and Access course work.
Our Manchester Museum hosts and partners with ProjectInc, a Specialist College for Creative Education, to make our cultural institutions more inclusive, engaging and creative for neurodiverse young people.
Our Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health partners with Manchester Metropolitan University and Keele University on Imagine Me Stories. This is a school library diversity initiative designed to tackle under-representation in UK school libraries by curating diverse resources and promoting better representation in literature for all students.
Our Science and Engineering Education Research and Innovation Hub undertakes a range of public engagement campaigns. These include the Great Science Share for Schools and the Greater Manchester Engineering Challenge, which enhances the University’s work in broadening the pipeline of young people with an interest in STEM subjects.
Public engagement partnerships
Q-Step data partnerships
Student learning partnerships
Justice Hub
In Place of War project
Manchester Innocence Project
Cultural venues and nature
Nature Recovery Network
Social Value Portal
Work experience bursaries
Influencing international and national employment policies to promote inclusive labour markets
Gender equality policies
Gender pay gap
Inclusive work schemes
Women in STEM
Girl Guides Rwanda remote volunteering
Students’ and women’s rights
Promoting gender equality through study programmes
On Gender
Gender equality in global value chains
Library and open access
ProjectInc
Imagine Me Stories
Great Science Share for Schools