One year on from redesigning the curriculum at the University of Chester, Dr Claire Stocks explains the ongoing impact of the team’s CDF funding and what the data is saying about the new curriculum.

In 2025, the University of Chester was successful in securing Collaborative Development Funding from Advance HE to produce a strategic toolkit to support whole institution change. The toolkit drew on an evaluation of a Design Sprint process developed by the Centre for Academic Innovation and Development (CAID) to support colleagues across the university to (re)design their curricula in line with a new academic framework and Future Skills Curriculum during 2024-25. As the 2025-26 academic year draws to a close, we reflect on the broader impact that our CDF project has had in terms of allowing us to learn from our findings and to build on the work that we did for our project.  

The CDF project 

Our CDF funding allowed us to undertake an in-depth evaluation of the change project that we had been immersed in, and provided funding for us to be able to engage external (international) collaborators to help us to develop our outputs. The process evaluation (which was based on the approach outlined by TASO) of our Design Sprint approach provided the data to underpin our toolkit, allowing us, our collaborators and other Advance-HE members to learn from our experience and that of the colleagues who participated in our change project. As part of our project, Advance HE hosted a webinar for us to share our intentions for the project and gather early insights into what would be useful for the sector. The session attracted over 100 participants from a range of national and institutional contexts, giving us a clear sense of how widely applicable our toolkit might be in supporting others to deliver curriculum transformation.  

Further reflections 

Although the focus of our initial evaluation was very much on the process we had used, the insights provided and our analysis of the data perhaps inevitably prompted the Chester team (Prof Jackie Potter, Prof Ruth Healey, Laura Milne and Dr Katharine Welsh) to reflect more deeply on our own part in the project. Importantly, it gave us the opportunity to interrogate our assumptions about how we and others would work together to implement the change. In particular, we have been inspired to reflect on how leadership was enacted (both by ourselves as Educational Developers, and by colleagues at all levels of the institution).  

Those reflections have led to three conference presentations over the last year (including one at the Advance HE Applied Leadership Symposium back in May 2025) where we have considered how notions of distributed leadership in HE might be impacted by the complex and challenging HE context that we all find ourselves in. We have also been invited to share our experiences with other institutions that are engaged in their own curriculum transformation projects through invited talks and keynote addresses, and via informal conversations and mentoring of senior leaders. In our presentations and conversations, we have presented our metaphor for how leadership worked at the various levels of our institution as we constructed our new curriculum. We have also used our reflections to draft a case study chapter around our experience of ‘leading from the middle’, and shared some recommendations for how we think we might be able to inhabit our leadership role(s) more effectively going forward.  

Early indications 

Within our own institution, we continue to evaluate the impact of the curriculum redesign. Following the process evaluation of the design sprints, we  are now undertaking evaluation activities to understand the impact of the curriculum changes on staff and student experience, and on student outcomes. We have also recently evaluated the ongoing support that CAID provided to colleagues as they prepared to deliver their new curricula from September 2025. At this stage, our evaluation data is incomplete, but early indications after the first term of delivery were positive. We have seen increases in pass rates, a reduction in withdrawals, and more on-time submissions for assessments. Staff have reported that they feel that the new structure is working well for undergraduates, and the process of redesign has prompted positive developments in assessment design, in particular. We are also seeing staff using their role within the curriculum redesign process as evidence of their effective collaborative leadership within claims for recognition as Advance HE Senior Fellows. Through processes like claiming recognition, colleagues are taking the opportunity to reflect on their approaches and understand effective leadership in times of complex and challenging change.  

Further evaluation over the next few months will seek to understand staff well-being one year into implementation of the new curriculum. Data to assess the full-year impact on continuation and related lead indicators will shortly become available, allowing a more holistic understanding of how the changes have played out across the full academic year.  

Conclusion 

The support that we received from Advance HE through the CDF initiative gave us the opportunity to undertake a more in-depth process evaluation of our approach to supporting institution-wide change. Our Advance HE contact helped us to clearly identify the strengths of our project, and encouraged us to make the most of our collaboration. It also influenced the design, delivery and process evaluation that followed during 2025/26 when CAID supported the course teams to move from conception to implementation of the new curriculum. The data gathered during the CDF work provided a rich source of evidence for us to reflect on and analyse – it helped us to better understand the challenges that colleagues experienced, how we could best lead change from our position as developers, and how the sprint process might be adapted to support business as usual (for instance, in ongoing quality assurance and enhancement processes). 

The work that we did for the CDF – and the work with our collaborative partners to understand and frame our findings – was indispensable in giving us extended opportunities for reflection and dissemination, allowing us to fully capitalise on the learning that we have gained (and continue to gain) from our institution-wide curriculum transformation.

Dr Claire Stocks (SFHEA) is Head of Academic Practice in the Centre for Academic Innovation and Development at the University of Chester.