Leaders across higher education are grappling with increasing challenges. We draw on our extensive real-world experience of leading and managing at the highest level to help you answer tough questions and make a real difference. We support you not only to shape strategy, but also to focus on delivering better outcomes, setting up you and your teams for long-term success.
Strategy Development
We work with you to help you make the right choices for your organisation’s future.
Strategic analysis
In our strategic analysis programme we work with you to understand the policy and operating context, your aspirations and mission and what your data indicate about your current performance and positioning. We help you to understand your risk environment and to evaluate strategic options for your strategy and future. We do this through supporting formal strategy events or programmes of facilitated support with your Board members or your executive team.
Strategic support
Making the right strategic choices in an increasingly challenging and competitive environment involves honest conversations and a high degree of engagement between executive leadership teams and non-executive boards. Our strategic support programme supports you through the process of making and delivering strategic choices.
Student Outcomes and Teaching Quality
Drawing on our leadership of the UK’s Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), as well as responding to more recent developments of the OfS new strategic approach to integrated quality, we work with you to build the right policies, cultures and practices which drive excellence and success for all.
We will help you develop your systems and structures to ensure that you and your students are set up well for the emergence of the new integrated data-led quality system.
Our approach is to work with you on programmes that are designed to address what you want to deliver at particular stages, and we tailor them to fit your institution’s needs.
Audit and Health Check
Our Audit and Health Check provides a desk- and interview-based assessment of your current profile and trajectory. It comprises an in-depth review of your TEF 2023 outcomes, an analysis of current data and institutional performance including B conditions, APP and TEF indicators, and a detailed appraisal of preparations for future assessment exercises.
Leadership Readiness
Our Leadership Readiness programme is about setting up your team for success. Delivered through a combination of workshops and tailored materials, we provide intensive training and development for key leaders, enabling them to embed excellence in teaching and student experience in an integrated quality system. This programme combines insight, challenge and support, and sets a clear roadmap for institutional success.
Deep Dive
Our Deep Dive programme is about helping you to crack persistent areas of challenge through developing bespoke solutions which maximise impact. It comprises diagnostic assessment, workshops and comparative insights from across the sector and beyond, which enable you to get to the heart of key challenge areas, and to deliver the changes necessary for improved institutional performance.
Embedding Excellence
Our Embedding Excellence programme offers an extended period of intensive institutional support. It is individually tailored, and built around ‘at shoulder’ support and mentoring for key leaders, including support for writing groups, liaison with student representatives and critiquing written or multi-media drafts, as well as intensive work with key leaders to shape, implement and monitor change, coaching and supporting key staff and considering the relationships between student experience and outcomes and institutional strategy.
Building Capability and Shaping Culture
We support individual leaders to grow and develop, and help build the performance of executive and senior teams.
One-to-one coaching and mentoring
One-to-one coaching and mentoring can be a critical intervention not only to support those new to role or to senior leadership, but also to help more experienced individuals navigate new challenges or to lead their teams through change. We are all experienced executive-level coaches and mentors, and through our network of associates and partners, we can also bring in a broader range of capacity and skills. Our work in this area currently includes one-to-one support for both academic and professional leaders, as well as for policy makers in the wider public sector
Leadership and team development
The current sector challenges put a particular premium on building high-performing teams, and supporting them to work in ways that give confidence both to Governing Bodies and to staff and students. We offer tailored sessions for senior teams where we can work through key strategy and delivery challenges, understand what’s working well as well as what isn’t, and help to formulate clear plans for enhancing performance and capability.
Innovation and new developments
We support you in designing, developing and delivering innovation and new models of delivery.
Our innovation support model is tailored and bespoke
Our work in this area includes exploring opportunities for new and innovative campus developments, transnational education and supporting partnership working to deliver place-based and civic initiatives.
We will work with you to understand your aspirations, test business drivers and desired impact, and identify the key options and choices which will underpin success. We will also work with you to design new structures and operating models, and to establish a secure and deliverable implementation plan.
Our work in this area includes exploring opportunities for new and innovative campus developments, transnational education and supporting partnership working to deliver place-based initiatives
Policy Insight and System Change
We offer analysis and insight at both sectoral and local level, identifying trends, policy choices and providing advice on routes to success.
Rapidly changing policy and operating contexts for higher education demand successful understanding and nimble responses. Our experience and expertise equip us to offer high-quality analysis and insight into higher education policy and practice.
We work with policy makers, regulators and others to bring analysis and insight at both sectoral and local level, identifying trends, policy choices and providing advice on routes to future success. Our thought leadership and expertise includes recent work on financial sustainability, system change, place-making, and artificial intelligence.