The M1 from Leeds to Sheffield is remarkably quiet at 2030 in the evening - much more so than at 1545 when I was heading north for a couple of meetings back to back at the University of Leeds.  Leeds, Sheffield and York make up the White Rose Consortium - a grouping that most people have probably heard of yet few have really experienced.  Today I was at a consortium meeting - and at another that followed it which involved one of a series of 'consortium plus' groupings for specific purposes: in this case the 'plus' was Hull.

In my view we under-exploit the possibilities of these collaborations with other universities.  It is rather as if we see our own institutions as 'lone scholars' and haven't yet realised what teamwork could do for us. Yet Leeds, Sheffield and York togther make up a very powerful set of top-rated research-led universities within 75 minutes drive of each other.  Active collaborations I have been involved with include the White Rose Centre for Enterprise which then formed the nucleus of the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning that has given us our Enterprise Zone in Portobello as a legacy; the White Rose East Asian programme of major research council funding for a 5 year programme in Leeds and Sheffield; and more recently the winning of a joint Doctoral Training Centre from the Economic and Social Research Council which makes the three collaborating universities the second most powerful social science training force in the country.  There are further active collaborations in Engineering, the Sciences, and in Health Innovations.

White Rose plus groupings include one with Sheffield Hallam that manages the National Science Learning Centre in York and all the other Regional Science Learning Centres.  The potential of that seems to me to be under-exploited. We are managing one of the biggest experiments in science education, yet it is an experiment that is not yet being fully evaluated.

Today's second meeting in Leeds (with Hull also there) was about the 'Excellence Hub' that we have jointly been running for the last three years, targeting gifted-and-talented young people from widening participation backgrounds with co-ordinated aspiration-raising activities across our four universities.  I suspect that few people reading this blog will know anything about this ongoing action - which has proved to be the most successful of the 9 Excellence Hubs set up with Department for Education funding.  The other 8 have all already ceased operation.

So I think we don't fully recognise the potential for inter-university collaboration, but I don't really know how to raise the profile and the possibilities of existing and future collaborations.  Probably the last thing people want is yet another newsletter or e-mail. Suggestions would be welcomed.