Flexible learning needs flexible housing

It said that the government would work with the sector to draft a “statement of expectations” on the issue, calling on providers to work strategically with local authorities to ensure adequate provision for the students they recruit.

Given that average rents across England now sit close to the maximum maintenance loan – and in London exceed it – the commitment was overdue. The question is what that statement will actually say.

We don’t know yet. But while we drum our fingers on the table, it’s worth being clear about what problem the white paper actually needs to solve – because the danger is that the sector’s default mental model of student accommodation is badly out of date.

The commuter-or-halls binary

The traditional picture runs something like this – some students live at home and commute, everyone else signs a full academic-year tenancy in halls or a shared house.

That binary was always a simplification. As the student population has widened – and as universities have worked hard to recruit more diverse students – it has become increasingly inadequate as a planning assumption.

Lots of students don’t have clean, continuous relationships with their housing. I often hear about circumstances that create short-duration residential needs – nursing and allied health students assigned to placements far from their usual base for several weeks, students in the gap between a halls contract ending and a private tenancy beginning (commonly around ten days, but sometimes longer), part-time postgraduate students attending intensive teaching blocks and needing somewhere to stay for a few nights at a time.

There’s students whose relationship or home situation breaks down mid-year and who need somewhere safe immediately, international students arriving weeks early for pre-sessional language programmes, distance learners needing occasional accommodation for residentials. None of these map onto a full-year tenancy. None are well served by the current market.

There’s a reverse dynamic I think a lot about too. During Covid, those dreaming up “student travel days” hadn’t noticed that large numbers of students were going home at weekends – halls half-empty by Friday evening. I suspect the mirror image is increasingly visible now. If more students are choosing to live at home, many will have in the past been renting – and they no longer live a short hop from campus.

They often live at a punishing commuting distance – and they may need to stay near their institution for a couple of nights mid-week, for late seminars, early-morning labs, placement shifts, or to do things like joining an activity, or striking up a relationship. These students don’t want a full tenancy. They want a bed on Tuesday and Wednesday. That need sits right in the middle of the Venn diagram between commuter and resident – and current provision has nothing to offer them.

NUS Scotland surveys have consistently found that 12 per cent of all students have experienced homelessness during their studies – rising to one in three among estranged and care-experienced students. A more recent NUS UK survey found one in three students struggling to pay housing costs, with 26 per cent having experienced difficulties paying rent in full.

HEPI’s paper on universities and homelessness, published in 2022, found that applications for homelessness assistance per head are nearly 40 per cent higher in university towns and cities than in comparable non-university areas, that rough sleeping is more than three times higher, and households in temporary accommodation more than double.

The paper noted that universities had been “strikingly incurious” about homelessness among their own students, and recommended that institutions collect basic housing stability data and consider offering short-term supported tenancies in halls. I’m guessing that recommendation has not been widely acted on.

Current provision tends to fall into one of three categories, none of them satisfactory as welfare infrastructure. There’s the commercial short-stay PBSA market, which serves international students and interns with sufficient income but is priced well beyond the means of a domestic student on a maintenance loan.

There’s some emergency provision that universities maintain for recognised vulnerable groups – care-experienced students, estranged students, refugees – which is genuinely important but covers a narrow slice of need. And in London specifically, there’s a significant wedge of charity and religious-affiliated accommodation – LHA London, International Students House, Lee Abbey, and a dozen others – which offer flexible, affordable, sometimes very short stays, but has no meaningful equivalent anywhere else in the country.

After all, sofa surfing doesn’t work if your landlord has turned the living room into two bedrooms. And most have.

A few years back, Universities UK produced guidance for senior leaders on good practice in student accommodation that asked, buried in the “internal working” section, whether institutions have an agreed position on “whether it considers itself the housing provider of last resort to students.”

The guidance suggested possibilities like “temporary accommodation in dorms/hotels” – but everything else in the document was about PBSA pipelines, HMO markets, local authority partnerships, and demand forecasting for the permanent residential student. The commuter-or-halls binary was completely baked in.

Looking elsewhere

Other systems have found more structured responses to the gap. The Dutch SSH network – a non-profit housing provider operating across multiple university cities – has built a formal three-tier model: standard year-long tenancies, defined short-stay products for incoming international students, and named emergency housing beds with a maximum duration of four months, released at the start of each academic year for students who arrive without accommodation secured. It’s a product architecture – with different contracts, different pricing, and different eligibility criteria at each tier – that just doesn’t exist in UK student housing.

Örebro Student Union runs an “Akutboende” emergency accommodation scheme at the start of each term – a simple hosting model with basic minimum standards and a short contract – and Örebro University itself signposts the union’s scheme as a named option alongside private-market routes. It’s a governance model in which the student organisation is the operational actor and the institution is the enabler, rather than emergency welfare being the university’s problem alone.

When I was out at Eurovision in 2023, I came across the “Bed and Study” model developed at Kristianstad University in Sweden – which was specifically designed around short-duration residential needs rather than permanent tenancies.

Developed through a collaboration between the municipality, the university, and the SU, the scheme negotiates hotel rooms at significantly reduced rates – rooms with study spaces and free tea and coffee – for students sitting exams, attending intensive teaching blocks, or navigating the start-of-semester gap before student housing becomes available.

Kristianstad won Sweden’s national Student City of the Year award in 2024, with the jury specifically highlighting Bed and Study as an example of what working collaboration between students, institutions, local government, and business actually produces.

A remix is coming

In Scotland, the Housing (Scotland) Act 2025 offered an opportunity to place a statutory “ask and act” duty on bodies that encounter people at risk of homelessness. Non-government amendments were lodged at Stage 2 specifically to add higher education institutions – and private PBSA providers – to the list of relevant bodies subject to that duty, alongside similar proposals to include GPs, MSPs and the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service.

The minister’s response was not that universities shouldn’t be included, but that the bill already contained a power to extend the list of relevant bodies by secondary legislation – and that this was the appropriate route. The government’s only concession was to add Social Security Scotland to the list on the face of the bill.

No such secondary legislation has appeared. Indeed, the ask and act duty itself has not yet commenced – the Scottish Government launched 15 pilot projects in November 2025 to test the measures before they come into force, with a three-year backstop on commencement written into the Act. The power to add universities exists – it’s just sitting unused.

If the white paper’s statement of expectations arrives as a remix of the existing UUK guidance – focused as it is on PBSA pipelines, first-year guarantees, and local authority strategic planning – it will address real problems while leaving the temporary provision gap entirely untouched. The commuter-or-halls binary will remain baked in, and the students whose lives don’t fit either category will remain invisible to the planning system.

There’s a more positive argument here too, beyond simply filling a gap. The same white paper that promises an accommodation statement also talks about modular learning, break points in degree programmes, and flexible study routes as central to its vision for the sector.

If the government is serious about students studying in blocks, pausing and returning, moving between providers, or combining employment and study – all of which the white paper explicitly encourages – then it needs housing infrastructure that matches.

You can’t build a flexible learning system and leave the accommodation model frozen at “sign a fifty-two week tenancy before you even know your timetable.” That Dutch three-tier product architecture, or the Kristianstad hotel model, aren’t just welfare provision – they’re what the infrastructure looks like when it catches up with how students actually study.

There’s also an institutional efficiency – universities that help students navigate the gap between halls and private tenancy, or that have some bedspaces for students who’ve been sexually assaulted in their cluster flat, or that offer a few nights near campus for a nursing student on rotation, are reducing the risk of dropout at exactly the moments when students are most likely to walk.

In an ideal world, the statement will include some recognition that accommodation planning needs to account for use-cases that don’t look like a full-year tenancy – that placement students, part-time learners, students between contracts, and students in crisis have residential needs that are currently no one’s responsibility to plan for.

If nothing else, a white paper that promises flexible study but delivers a conventional accommodation expectations statement will have failed on its own terms.