Director of Disruptive Learning @UA92

As a leader of modern education and national ambassador for education, Aaron Saxton (aka Sax) joined University Academy 92 (UA92) as the Director of Disruptive Learning in the summer of 2021. Believed to be one of the first roles of its kind in Higher Education in the UK, Sax has taken on a role that’s further enhancing UA92’s already innovative approach to education by ensuring it has the right academic offer that empowers careers and opportunities as well as enabling and inspiring students from all backgrounds. Sax’s key roles cover UA92’s apprenticeship programmes, develop the digital strategy for learning, and development, and lead UA92’s offering of digital bootcamps. In the short space of time Sax has been at UA92, he has been pivotal in securing and winning a £2m capital funding bid from the Office for Students to build and launch a ground-breaking Digital Academy that opened in September 2022. The Digital Academy will deliver enhanced and cutting-edge learning in an employer led, industry co-developed curriculum designed to prepare, educate and develop people of all backgrounds for a digital career. The academy will be a digital ecosystem dedicated to digital learning and development, leadership and enterprise. It includes a VR/AR lab, a fully immersive 360-degree Igloo learning space, flex-tech classrooms, and digital media suites. It will be utilised by a range of students including those completing undergraduate computer science degrees, digital bootcamps and apprenticeships. Certified short courses such as DevOps, Cloud, Linux, web dev, data science, cyber security, AR, VR and AI will also be run at the academy. Aaron believes that in order to improve the digital skills labour market there needs to be significant investment in the talent of the future. We need to be brave, bold and disruptive in our approach.