Second 2024 SBC Management Council Meeting held

On the afternoon of 6th December, the second 2024 SBC Management Council Meeting was held at Fuxing Road campus of USST. The Management Council members from USST including Professor ZHU Xinyuan, President of USST and Chair of the SBC Management Council, Dr CAI Yonglian, Vice President of USST and Dean of SBC, and the members from UK partners including Professor Robert Anthony Cryan, Vice-Chancellor and Chief Executive of the University of Huddersfield and Stuart Smith attended the meeting. Professor Rupert Ward, Executive Dean of SBC and other SBC Executives also presented at the meeting. President ZHU Xinyuan chaired the meeting.

President ZHU expressed his gratitude to SBC’s UK partners for their hard work and contributions for the internationalisation of the College out of concern. He pointed out that since the last Management Council Meeting held on 26^th July, SBC has made smooth progress in all aspects and made remarkable achievements. The College has reformed the enrolment policies for free entry students this year, which optimised the structure and quality of freshmen. With great emphasis on the development of the College, USST vigorously promoted its infrastructure to further improve the students' learning and living environment, bringing more benefits to students’ all-round development. SBC actively “introduced overseas educational resources” by carrying out cooperation and exchanges with partner universities in cooperative education, joint cultivation, quality assurance, international accreditations, teacher exchange, student study tour, entrepreneurship and innovation education, international summer school, etc., laying a foundation for further cooperation. Also, the College took the initiative to "go global" to explore innovative management models by building an exchange platform of Sino-foreign cooperation education, which not only provided useful experience for sister colleges and universities, but also provided new insights for the high-quality development of the College.

At the 10th anniversary of establishment of the Chinese-foreign Joint Education Committee (CJEC), SBC was honoured with CJEC Outstanding Contribution Award for its achievements and contributions in promoting the development of Sino-foreign cooperative education, the quality of education, as well as international exchanges and cooperation in recent years. All the achievements SBC has made are impossible without the great support from its UK partner universities and we hope that both sides will continue to build on our strengths and expand mutual construction to promote the next high-quality development of SBC, ZHU said.

Professor Rupert Ward made a work report and all Management Council members had a thorough discussion about international recruitment, free entry programmes, student academic development, educational quality, strategic plans and other issues. He expressed his gratitude to all the leadership and colleagues of both sides for their support and care and said that SBC will promote its internationalisation by further improving mutual innovation, talent development through cooperation with UK partner universities. It’s worth mentioning that SBC was awarded “Partner Award 2024 of Outstanding Contribution” in recognition of its high quality education development and remarkable achievements in recent years.

The Management Council members unanimously affirmed the achievements and progress of SBC in 2024, highly praised the College's continuous efforts and remarkable results in free entry enrolment reform, student source structure, student study tours between SBC-USST and UK partner universities, international accreditations and more. It is hoped that both sides will build on their strength to boost the development of SBC and cooperation in all aspects, which pushes the high-quality international education between China and the UK to a new level.

This Management Council Meeting clarified the direction and strategies for the future development of SBC. SBC will take this conference as an opportunity to further improve its quality of talent development, internationalisation and level of education, making the best of its unique educational mode of 1 to N Consortium model.