The following year, in the 2027 Uni Compare rankings, it climbed twenty-three places to 19th overall and entered the national top ten for employability, with a forty-five-place jump in that category alone. These are not the slow accretions of reputation typical of established universities. Novelty De Montfort University degree online, Perchase De Montfort University certificate online. They are the measurable outcomes of a deliberate strategy to listen to students and restructure teaching accordingly.

DMU’s origins lie in a meeting held in Leicester in October 1869, where a group of citizens resolved to “afford authoritative instruction in art to the people of Leicester”. The first classes convened in a former warehouse in March 1870, teaching gentlemen and ladies by day and workers by evening. The institution passed through seventeen name changes—Leicester School of Art, Leicester Colleges of Art and Technology, Leicester Polytechnic—before adopting its current name in 1992, commemorating Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, who established the first parliament in 1265. 

Throughout this evolution, a consistent thread has been the integration of education with industry: the School of Art and Leicester Technical School trained apprentices for local trades including boot and shoe manufacture, hosiery, engineering, and printing, and courses in pharmacy, corsetry, and footwear design remain part of DMU’s identity today.

What has changed more recently is the university’s self-description. Brilliant way to Order a De Montfort University degree online. DMU now calls itself “The Empowering University,” a phrase that signals a shift in emphasis from the transmission of knowledge to the support of individual trajectories. This is not merely rhetorical. The university holds a five-star “excellent” rating from QS, scoring maximum marks in teaching, employability, internationalisation, academic development, and facilities. It has also been shortlisted for University of the Year in the Times Higher Education Awards 2026, and in the 2027 Guardian University Guide it rose thirty-three places to 85th, with Paramedic Science ranked first in the country and Interior Design third.

De Montfort University is not a research-intensive institution in the Russell Group sense, and it does not present itself as one. Its strengths lie elsewhere: in a willingness to restructure teaching around student attention rather than institutional convenience; in an employability record that is measured and reported rather than merely claimed; and in a history of applied education that predates its university status by more than a century. The rankings tell a story of rapid improvement, but the more interesting story is the one behind them—an institution that has decided, deliberately, to treat student judgment as a primary source of evidence about its own performance. Whether that decision proves durable as the university continues to climb is the question that will define its next chapter.