Schedule

12:30 - 13:20 - Hot-button Topic Lunchtime Sessions

Informal lunchtime roundtables co-hosted by our Advisory Circle and partners on hot-button topics for the sector and its professional services leaders.

Holding Trust Under Increased Scrutiny

with Vicki Hayhurst, Founder and CEO, Hayhurst & Co, and Lucy Everest, Chief Operating Officer, University of Liverpool

Universities are navigating financial pressure, constant organisational change and increasing scrutiny from staff, unions, students and stakeholders. Communicating difficult decisions - including budget cuts, restructuring and strategic shifts - requires honesty, clarity and empathy, even when all the answers are either not known, or can't be explicitly outlined. This session will explore how senior university leaders can maintain credibility, trust and institutional confidence during periods of uncertainty and change. Through a facilitated roundtable discussion, participants will receive and share practical approaches for how senior leaders across all functions can communicate hard messages whilst building deeper engagement with stakeholders.

You Can't Just Cut Your Way Out - Building a Plan for Institutional Resilience

with Shaun Horan, Senior Director, Huron, and Andrew Monk, Executive Director of Global Engagement, University of Bristol

HE is awash with news of cuts, redundancies, and growing existential risk. Institutions must address near-term deficits while maintaining a focus on long-term investment and mission delivery. This session explores a 9-part framework to build institutional resilience – including academic portfolio, revenue diversification, organisational optimisation, tech infrastructure, and strategic partnerships.

Specifically, we will share tactical and strategic approaches to build financial plans that balance revenue and cost reduction, hold to mission, and successfully message this work to campus and beyond. This will include turnaround case studies as well as key lessons learned and mistakes to avoid from recent change programmes.

What is really going on with graduate jobs, and what should universities do about it

with Martin Edmondson, CEO, Graduate Futures Institute and Alistair Jarvis CBE, Chief Executive Officer, Advance HE

Graduate employment, and its links to perceived degree value, is rarely out of the news at the moment. The most recent Graduate Outcomes data shows a dip in employment and rise in unemployment. Simultaneously the industrial strategy and ONS data continues to show growth in demand for Higher level skills. This session will explore what is really going on in graduate employment and employability, what we can do about it, and how everyone in a university can make a difference to this vital area of HE work.

When the World Gets Complicated: Geopolitics, Global Partnerships and the Choices Universities Must Make

With Vydehi Chinta, Chief Product Officer, Infonetica, Jennifer Johnson, Director of Research & Innovation, Loughborough University and Dr Camelia Dijkstra, ARMA

International collaboration built modern UK universities. But it has never been more valuable or more contested. Foreign intervention, shifting alliances and growing public scrutiny are forcing UK universities to make difficult judgements about who they work with, on what terms, and why.

This session picks up from the conference's opening address to discuss the harder questions: Has your institution articulated its risk appetite for global engagement? And does that extend beyond formal research contracts to the full range of partnership activity such as unfunded research, alumni relationships, and beyond? Through a candid, peer-led roundtable, senior leaders will explore what mature, confident international engagement looks like in practice, and what it takes to lead institutions through this landscape.

From impact to intent: achieving £100 billion of innovation investment

with Alex Craven, Co-founder and CEO, The Data City, Professor Jane Robinson, Pro-Vice Chancellor, Engagement and Place, Newcastle University, and Stuart Wilkinson, CEO, Knowledge Exchange

Universities UK has set a goal to double external investment into university innovation to more than £100 billion over the next decade. That is not money universities receive, it is investment they have to attract, by convening investors, founders, mayors and government and proving where their research connects to real companies and growth sectors. The shift is from evidencing impact to demonstrating intent.

So who inside the university actually does that work, and how? This roundtable looks at why it can no longer sit with one team, how knowledge exchange professionals can lead the response, and how the right data and insight can help universities show those connections, evidence intent and make the case to investors. A working conversation, not a panel. Hosted by The Data City with Knowledge Exchange UK.

Your International Student Recruitment is lying to you: how to understand the real economics of routes, price and partnership

with Kasia Cakala, Executive Director, Education Pathways Development, Oxford International Education Group and Jo Kite, Director, External Relations, University of Birmingham

Most universities do not have an international strategy. They have a set of disconnected activities, each with different economics, risks and outcomes, measured by starts because starts are the easiest thing to count.

The session challenges participants to treat every student entry route as a strategic route with its own economics, not as a channel to feed volume. Further, universities need to stop optimising only the front door. In a market shaped by visa volatility, affordability pressures, graduate outcome expectations, financial fragility and rising competition from alternative destinations, international strategies must connect entry routes, student success, pricing, cost of acquisition, compliance, progression and employment outcomes

Direct recruitment, agents, aggregators, articulation, TNE, online, sponsorship, pathway colleges, hubs and progression partnerships all behave differently. Each has a different cost of acquisition, conversion profile, net yield, compliance risk, continuation rate and outcome story. If universities do not understand those differences, they will buy volume at the expense of margin, quality, reputation and future demand.

The question then is which of your recruitment routes would you stop growing if you could see its true economics?

If international students pay the bills, who gets to tell the story?: Rebuilding the public case for International Education

with David Pilsbury, Chief Development Officer, Oxford International and Lily Rumsey, Executive Director, BUILA

Compliance, confidence and social licence in the new RAG world

We have not only made international students financially indispensable, but we have then endlessly defended our need to recruit them as our only source of free cash and then wonder why we have lost the confidence of the public that thinks we are just arguing about money from the Government like everyone else. If the fall in public confidence continues we will lose the strong social licence that has been the bedrock of the sector over the last 100 years.

The session will explore how In an environment of tighter sponsor compliance, RAG ratings, falling postgraduate starts, housing pressure, migration politics and financial fragility, universities can defend international recruitment without reducing students to a simple income measure. It will argue that international education needs a new public compact: where students are welcome, universities recruit responsibly, routes are transparent, outcomes are evidenced, and local communities can see the benefit.

The session will explore how to build a credible public case that requires: better data, responsible recruitment, clearer evidence of local and regional value, stronger student support, more honest outcomes, and a more adult conversation about who benefits from international education.