When Harry and Katie met the Nottingham Civic Exchange

This time last year we were completing a project to explore how you could show the impact of inflation and household purchasing on different households. Five weeks of hard work had produced a data tool to explore inflation for different households across the UK. This wouldn’t have been possible without the creativity and hard work of our SPUR students Harry and Katie.

Within the five weeks we’d explored the ONS data, worked with an external partner, produced three blog posts and produced a working and publishable data tool. The From Headline to Breadline inflation tool which you can still use today has been useful for further projects and showcases the power of NTU students’ creativity and work ethic. The tool pulls on a range of ONS data sources and presents it in a digestible format for anyone in the UK to use. Simply plug in your personal details (household income, family size, your age and details of any dependent children) and it places you into one of 10 income groups. You can then see what people like you spend their household income on and how your inflation rate has varied to the Bank of England rate over time. There is also a useful comparison aspect so you can compare if you for example had a child, got divorced or moved regions.

None of this would have been possible without our two students who worked with us testing their skills, expanding their experiences and working with an external partner to deliver on a brief. During this years’ graduation one of these students, Harry Cooke, was awarded an excellent first class degree and we put him forward for the 2019 Business Management and Economics course prize. We are delighted to announce that he was awarded this prize during graduation this summer.

Following the completion of this year’s SPUR project with new SPUR students Tiff and Isabelle on hand car wash research (please read their blog) we hope they can build on their experience with Nottingham Civic Exchange to support them to have an equally successful final year of study.

Nottingham Civic Exchange has always attempted to engage students in our projects and our work with the Trent Institute of Learning and Teaching (and with our academic colleagues). This has proved to be a valuable way of realising that ambition. Throughout the upcoming academic year we will be providing a series of opportunities for students to work with us on our programmes of work.

Please watch this space and follow #NCEstudent for updates and new opportunities. NTU is moving forward to become a university reimagined through our #NTU2025 strategy and we look forward to providing further student and research collaborations alongside our other work, please get in touch if you have any ideas.