Finance Strategy

9

In recent years, the financial outlook of the UK Education sector has become increasingly challenging due to macro effects, such as the impact of the Covid pandemic, the “cost of living” crisis, and reduced public funding. Hartpury has successfully navigated these risks to date but needs to rebuild financial capacity and resilience to face similar risks in the foreseeable future. Therefore, we will increase our financial headroom to act as a buffer to cope with downturns, and we will further diversify our income sources to minimise the impact of individual risks. Hartpury is strongly invested in land and buildings and has a largely fixed cost base. To enable us to react faster to financial issues we will increase our asset and funding flexibility.

To achieve this, we will: 3.1. Further develop our culture and processes of identifying, analysing, evaluating and reacting to risks and issues. We will be clear on our level of risk appetite and develop approaches to avoid, minimise, transfer and accept risks. 3.2. Diversify our income sources through international student growth, adding to our curriculum and increasing our commercial activities. 3.3. Develop a financial mitigation strategy that will enable us to have sufficient liquidity in a downturn, and scale our cost base more dynamically.