There is a commonly held view of university students as eighteen-year-olds who move away from home for the first time after studying hard for their exams, before following what many see as a ‘traditional path’ into employment after they graduate.
That’s not how we see it at Northumbria.
Yes, we do welcome a huge number of eighteen-year-olds, but a significant portion of our students are mature.
They have opted to study later in life, perhaps after working or raising a family.
Many of them are training for new careers – either because they have ambition to do something different, or because the industry they are working in is changing at pace and they know they need higher level qualifications to progress.
But what happens to those people who perhaps didn’t do quite so well in their exams, or maybe didn’t even sit them at all?
If you walk around Newcastle, Sunderland, Middlesbrough or any other place in the North East, you'll meet plenty of people who left school with the wrong qualifications, or none at all.
They've spent the years since school holding down jobs, raising families or caring for parents.
Ambition is never a problem.
Where they really need help is navigating the route back in, when their background has previously held them back, and on how they can make it work around their busy lives.
That's the gap Northumbria University has built The Bridge to close.
The Bridge is a new way into a degree for adults without traditional entry qualifications, but with the potential and drive to change their circumstances.
It starts at foundation level and runs over four years, with the same two fixed study days each week, built around work and caring responsibilities rather than the other way round.
The first courses, in business and digital technologies, begin this November at our Coach Lane campus and will be delivered in partnership with Cambridge Education Group.
More subjects will follow as we align provision to the skills the region needs.
The numbers explain why it matters here more than most places.
Only 34% of working-age adults in the North East hold a higher-level qualification, against a national average of 43%.
These figures hold the whole region back.
At the exact same time, employers are in desperate need of skills in digital, engineering, health and leadership.
We need to look for innovative ways to develop these skills and create opportunities for more people to be able to study and succeed.
In doing this, we are driving social mobility across the region.
Over the last two weeks, thousands of students have graduated from Northumbria and during those ceremonies I reminded our new graduates that we are in an age where careers shift and pivot.
New technologies are changing the ways we once worked.
New innovations appear every day, creating roles and avenues we could never have predicted just a few short years ago.
The paths we expect our lives to take may not be the paths we ultimately pursue.
And it's vital to get more people from underrepresented backgrounds into university to gain the skills we need for the future.
I made that case at a panel we hosted in Westminster this month, with the Minister for Skills, Baroness Jacqui Smith.
The conversation with leaders in some of the UK’s largest businesses and colleagues with a shared interest in social mobility kept coming back to the same point on place-based social mobility.
For many, opportunity has a postcode as well as an age.
Sadly, where you're from shapes your choices as much as when you left school.
But this is also the mechanism by which the national picture changes.
Universities rooted in a region, like Northumbria, have a distinct role to play.
We employ thousands of local people and send thousands more graduates back into its workforce.
Around two-thirds of our undergraduates come from the North East and stay here to work after graduation.
We connect people to opportunity.
We build courses around the jobs that already exist here, and the jobs the region will need next.
We are an anchor institution with skin in the game, serving and developing the communities around us.
The Bridge is the logical next step for Northumbria to take.
It tells someone in their thirties or forties, working shifts or juggling childcare, that a degree, and everything that follows, isn’t a door that closes at eighteen.
The timing of someone's ambition shouldn't be dictated by the date they went to school or what they have done since.
If we're serious about social mobility in this region, we must also be serious about everyone it's meant to serve.
We can’t close doors to people because their work or family commitments or their grades haven’t aligned in that commonly held view of what a student is.
We need to open doors to ambition and to opportunity.
Barriers are moveable and we want to support people to transform their lives, and the lives of those around them.
That’s social mobility in action, and that’s the ambition behind The Bridge.
I hope it's one that other institutions and employers, across the North East and beyond, will get behind too.
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