About us

Faculty overview

Our Faculty brings together The Open University’s long-established practice-based disciplines in the key areas of education, health and social care and intercultural communication.

Firmly rooted in professional practice, both our teaching and our research sit at the cutting-edge of global conversations around our specialist areas. We are driven by our University’s social mission, and the nature of our disciplines and expertise mean that we are perfectly positioned to help tackle some of the key the fundamental societal challenges of our age.

We are made up of a community of over 360 researchers, more than 200 professional support staff and nearly 1,500 student tutors (Associate Lecturers), we support the education of around 45,000 students per year across both the four nations of the UK and further afield.

Our Faculty is home to 360+ researchers, 200+ professional support staff, 1400+ student tutors and 45,000+ students

Research and scholarship

The Centre for the Study of Global Development is our flagship global research centre bringing together all of our research expertise with the ambition of advancing a number of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals relating to poverty, health, wellbeing, education, decent jobs, and employment.

Find out more about our research.

Working culture

We strive to be inclusive in all we do and are proactively working to continually improve in this area for both our staff and students. We are extremely proud that in 2022 our School of Education, Childhood, Youth and Sports achieved our Faculty's first Athena Swan Charter Bronze Award - a globally recognised framework used to support and transform gender equality within higher education (HE) and research. Our two other Schools are also seeking to make their submissions.

Alongside the wider University's staff wellbeing and support programme, we also offer our own Wellbeing @ WELS initiative which uses our in-house expertise in the areas of health and wellbeing to support our colleagues.

To see our current job vacancies and the benefits offered by the OU please visit the University's vacancies page.