11 September 2018 
Karel Thomas, Executive Director
AdvanceHE's conference "Let's Talk Value", the finale of a project funded by the UK's regional HE funders involving 10 institutions of various shapes and sizes, was held on 11th September. Appropriately, it was well-attended by professionals from finance, HR, marketing and communications, and registry as well as governors, student representatives and a handful of supporters of HE and Integrated Reporting. The discussions involved now familiar terminology that was so new in BUFDG's 2016 foray into asking whether Integrated Reporting could help universities tell their stories better. We thought we were being provocative back then by saying, "when it comes to reporting, we are missing an opportunity" but a report by Professor Carol Adams, Let's talk value: How universities create value for students, staff and society, launched at the AdvanceHE conference, went much further saying, "[T]he sector is selling itself short". The report is supportive, full of ideas of how universties' reports could be improved (even if Integrated Reporting is not the aim), but challenging.
Whilst the FEHE SORP considers "that disclosure of the following items is best practice for all institutions:
Professor Adams contends that "[R]elative to other sectors, university annual reports have historically tended to be compliance oriented, and thus largely unimaginative documents that do not follow recognised frameworks for non-financial reporting".
If you are keen to know more about Integrated Reporting, the IIRC website is packed with good information and a database of reports to get you thinking, including The Crown Estate, whose Finance Director gave an interesting presentation at the AdvanceHE conference. The 2017 BUFDG report on the IIRC's reviews of four HEIs sets out how those organisations' 2015/16 annual reports stood up again the IR Framework and is as near to a "how to" as we have at the moment, although we hope the experience of those involved in the AdvanceHE project will soon be captured for posterity. And if all this whets your appetite to develop your university's narrative reporting for 2018/19, reading the 2017/18 reports of the ten institutions will be essential - you'll find all the links on the BUFDG website.
