The Global Student material had its origins in a large-scale project funded in 2009 and 2010 by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE ). The King's-Warwick ‘Graduate Pledge’ project was a collaboration between King's College London and the University of Warwick, to research new ways of developing student capabilities in research-led universities. Within this overall research programme, the Global People team at the Centre for Applied Linguistics was funded to carry out work on developing the “globally-oriented curriculum”. The Centre’s project was entitled ‘Using an intercultural competency framework to develop students’ ability to work and communicate across cultures’ and consisted, firstly, in researching how intercultural competencies could contribute to the internationalisation strategies of research-led universities and, secondly, in identifying actual opportunities to make that contribution at the University of Warwick.

The research and development activities undertaken as part of this project involved collaboration with a number of departments at Warwick, including the International Office, the Student Careers and Skills Centre and Warwick Business School. There were three direct outputs from the research and a number of practical activities implemented at Warwick as a result of the research collaborations.