Paul Manners is Associate Professor in Public Engagement at the University of the West of England, and a founding Director of the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE).
The NCCPE was established in 2008 to support universities to embed innovative approaches to involving the public in their work. Paul oversees the NCCPE’s coordination of a range of culture change and capacity building projects. He has a particular interest in approaches to supporting organisational change, partnership working, impact assessment and innovation in engagement.
Paul has a Master’s in Education, and a long track record designing and delivering engagement and culture change projects for organisations including the BBC, where he worked for 18 years. He trained as a secondary English teacher and after teaching in London for five years, joined the BBC at the Open University as a producer of educational television and multimedia, where he worked for 12 years. He then joined BBC Learning as an executive producer, responsible for a number of broadcast-led public engagement campaigns, including the People’s War project, gathering tens of thousands personal reminiscences about WWII into an online archive; and projects with the Natural History Unit, to inspire public involvement with nature. He was chair of the National Trust’s advisory group on Collections and Interpretation from 2007 to 2023.