SROC25
23-25 April 2025
Why bother?
Presenter: Johnny Rich
Institution: Push & Engineering Professors’ Council
Johnny Rich has a number of roles including Chief Executive of outreach organisation Push, Chief Executive of the Engineering Professors’ Council, and a consultant in higher education policy and communications. His recent clients include the European Commission, HEPI, Youth Sight and a host of recruiters, education bodies and media organisations.
Since founding Push in 1992, Johnny has built it into an influential award-winning non-profit organization support social mobility and providing information, advice and research about universities, careers and employability. Push runs an award-winning programme of outreach and training events that visits nearly 400 schools and colleges each year.
The Engineering Professors’ Council is the voice of engineering in UK higher education. Under Johnny’s stewardship since 2016, its membership has grown to over 8,000 academics in 85 universities and the EPC has become an influential force in national policy in HE, skills and industrial strategy.
Johnny is widely regarded as an expert on student choice, information and opportunity, and on employability. As a contributor to various think tanks and strategy bodies, Johnny speaks and writes widely on policy debates in education, careers, wider participation and social mobility. He has recently spearheaded projects on school-leaver recruitment, work-related learning and engineering social mobility.
He is also Co-Chair of the Fair Access Coalition, a group of third sector organisations supporting disadvantaged young people; a board member of the Centre for Engineering Education; and a former director of the Higher Education Academy.
With degrees from the Universities of Durham and East Anglia, his background also includes jobs in journalism, publishing, media relations, television production and web development. He appears regularly on television and radio and is author of the highly acclaimed novel The Human Script.
In this plenary session, Johnny will discuss transformational outcomes for individual students, drawing together themes of value, employability and social justice, along with the role of records and metrics in understanding and supporting this.