A £1 million upgrade to teaching facilities at the main Plas Coch campus and the Regent Street art school site are part of a £60 million Campus 2025 programme to improve its sites. One of them, Glyndwr University Racecourse Stadium, is shared with Wrexham football club, with interest peaking after an investment in the club by the Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney.

The university gained silver in the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), scoring well for part-time courses. The TEF panel was impressed by the high levels of interaction with industry, business and the public sector and praised the quality of work-based learning that matches the region’s priorities.

The Centre for the Creative Industries on the Wrexham campus features high-quality studios used by students on television production degree courses, and is the regional home of BBC Cymru Wales. Other specialist facilities reflect the university’s diverse subject areas and include a complementary medicine clinic, laboratories for computer game development and for the study of crime scenes. There is also a flight simulator and supersonic wind tunnel.

The rural Northop campus in Flintshire specialises in animal studies and biodiversity courses, and has a small animal unit and an equine centre. The St Asaph campus in Denbighshire is a research centre for the opto-electronics industry, focusing on technology to make high-resolution telescopes. The campus incubator offers a programme for space industry start-ups.

Wrexham Glyndwr has introduced six new degrees within nursing and health. The first mental health nursing students started their courses in September 2022, as did those on degrees in children’s nursing, paramedic science, speech and language therapy, nutrition and dietetics, and operating practice. 

The courses had triggered a huge 40 per cent increase in applications by the end of March 2022 compared with the same point in the application cycle the year before, building on a small rise in applications in 2021 that halted four years of decline. Fewer first-years started courses in 2021 than have done before, however, with enrolments falling by 12 per cent, their fifth consecutive decline. 

The university continues to adapt and expand its curriculum. From 2023 degrees will be offered in canine behaviour, training and performance, practical wildlife management, and veterinary physiotherapy. 

In our analysis of the results of the latest National Student Survey, published in summer 2022, the university ranks 7= for satisfaction with teaching quality — proof that the hybrid model of online and in-person lectures offered at Glyndwr is popular with its students. It ranks 29= for how students feel about  the wider undergraduate experience. The results follow stellar student satisfaction scores during the pandemic, which lifted the university to second place behind only St Andrews for satisfaction with teaching quality. 

In partnership with Airbus, which has a large plant near by, Wrexham Glyndwr’s Advanced Composite Training and Development Centre in Broughton carries out research to help improve the efficiency of aircraft, and feeds into the university’s engineering courses.

Social work and social policy produced some of Glyndwr’s best results in the latest Research Excellence Framework (REF 2021), with some world-leading research. The accolade will be a boon to staff setting up a new Social Inclusion Research Institute at the university. However, the university has fallen to 126= in our research quality index against improved performance across the sector compared with the previous national assessment in 2014.

Graduate prospects improved by 11 places in our latest analysis of the numbers in highly skilled work or postgraduate study 15 months after leaving Wrexham Glyndwr. 

The university’s Racecourse stadium, which hosts journalism, business, history and sport students, features the world’s oldest international football ground in use. The campus also has a modern sports centre with two floodlit artificial pitches, a human performance laboratory and indoor facilities.

 Many students live at home, allowing all first-years who required a room to get one in 2021.