As a professional tutor at Liverpool Hope University, Mike Taylor has interviewed numerous prospective students over the years. A running theme is that they are excited to train at Liverpool Hope because they know a teacher who trained there, who has recommended that they follow in their footsteps. They also often tell Taylor, who specialises in the training of secondary school science teachers, that they want to learn at Liverpool Hope because of its inspiring history and progressive reputation, as well as its guiding philosophy of preparing its graduates to serve the common good.
In 1844, when the first of Liverpool Hope’s three founding colleges was established, England needed some of that. There were just five universities in the country, but none admitted women, and the majority didn’t accept Catholics or Jews. Liverpool Hope’s founding colleges were among the first to begin opening up higher education to those groups and since then, the university has been a trailblazer for harmony and inclusiveness.
It grew out of three teacher training colleges (the Anglican St Katharine’s, founded in 1844, and the Catholic colleges of Notre Dame, founded in 1856, and Christ’s, founded in 1964). When they came together in 2005 and achieved full university status, the name “Hope” was adopted from Hope Street, which links Liverpool’s Anglican and Catholic cathedrals, a richly symbolic example of what can happen when people unite and work together in a city which had historically been divided. That year, it became only the second university in the UK to appoint a non-white vice-chancellor, Prof Gerald Pillay.
To this day, it remains deeply committed to the idea that education is for everyone. Fifty-four per cent of students are from high deprivation areas, 49% are the first in their family to attend university and there is a focus on ensuring graduates are prepared to serve all communities and people.
Its aim is to be the centre of quality teacher education in the UK, producing graduates capable of delivering an outstanding future for the children they teach.
This has led to a concept of the “Hope teacher”, says Taylor. “Our local school partners are well versed in the idea that Hope teachers are different,” he adds. “Our students are resourceful, resilient, reflective and reciprocal and it’s great to make that kind of difference in the local community.”
Taylor says “teaching is in our DNA” and that you can “feel the history” of Liverpool Hope across its classrooms, in the campus and among its staff and students. But it is not an institution that faces backwards. It continues to challenge what makes a good teacher, to modernise its methods and to use its agility as a small, vibrant institution to prepare teachers for an ever-changing world.
“While we’re proud of our history, everyone here wants to continue to improve and build on that foundation, so we keep current and up to date,” he says. “An ever-changing world means that there might be new problems that no one’s faced before, so we need our students to be not just consumers of existing research but creators of new practice.
“A changing world throws up opportunities as well as challenges,” he says. So while the university uses the core content framework from the Department for Education, he says it uses it as a “baseline” to transcend. This is all in the service of going above and beyond to meet the needs of contemporary society and the political challenges education faces.
“At Liverpool Hope we make sure our students move beyond that criteria, to become subject experts and subject leaders going forward. We want them to become leaders and developers of education research for the future. We want them to not just consume research but critically implement it in the classroom.”
No wonder it continues to flourish. The Guardian University Guide 2024 ranked Liverpool Hope as number one in the north-west for education, and the Complete University Guide 2024 ranked it in the top three for the north-west for student satisfaction. Taylor says one of the things he loves about his job is that it is “making a difference in the local community”, and “when Ofsted visited us, they picked up on that too”.
Liverpool Hope leads the way in helping tomorrow’s teachers develop the resilience they will need to flourish in a job of challenges as well as satisfactions, he says. “We want them to make a lasting difference in their schools and we want them to stay there.
“They need to be armed with some training about resilience, wellbeing and how to manage workloads. Teaching can be challenging, but there are ways through it. We want our students to stay in teaching for the long run because we’ve helped them look after themselves.”
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