Student advising is one of the fastest-evolving and most contested areas of UK higher education.
Institutions are under increasing pressure to demonstrate impact on continuation, outcomes, and student experience, while navigating shrinking resources, rising student need, and staff burnout.
For us, the most important developments in advising are not new dashboards, policy rewrites, or structural short-term fixes. They are clarity of purpose, professional boundaries, and institutional maturity, of which there seems to have been a significant culture shift.
Drawing on insights shared in a panel discussion at the UK Advising and Tutoring (UKAT) Conference 2026 and building on a multi-institutional project led by Kortext, we present several lessons for the sector in the hope that they can help those considering how to “fix” their student advising systems ahead of the 26-27 academic year. These lessons challenge long-standing assumptions about personal tutoring and point towards a more sustainable, strategic future for student advising.
Purpose, purpose, purpose
Many institutions and sector bodies are developing and exploring frameworks to support and enhance their advising activities. One example is a framework developed through a prior Wonkhe-Kortext-Solutionpath research project, From support to success.
This project proposed that student advising systems only work when institutions know what they want to accomplish (theory), people understand their roles, limits, and value (people), and data are used intentionally to support decision-making (data).
Remove any one of these elements and the system does not work. It is not the individual components that matter most, but the relationships between them – how data informs professional judgement, how people understand institutional purpose, and how success is defined and evaluated.
None of the institutions in the project began revising their tutoring and advising with this framework in mind. Rather, it facilitated a shared language across institutions to support participants in thinking systematically and holistically about advising design. In this sense, the “data, people, theory” should be a guiding principle rather than just a catch slogan.
Involving students
Many well-meaning institutions’ student experience strategies proclaim to be “student‑centred and inclusive”, and often they are in principle. But as time goes on, term starts, people get busier and motivation to implement such new frameworks wane, there is a risk students end up less and less involved in advising processes. Student partnership and inclusion mean advising is not done to students, but done with them, and different student and institutional needs are designed in from the outset
Academic staff involved in personal tutoring and advising roles often describe a perception that they are expected to act in loco parentis or as a therapist for their students. While we do not propose this is appropriate or what advisors should be doing, students often raise there is a disconnect in how they view and understand the purpose of an advisory relationship.
There are two clear issues. The first being that many do not understand the purpose of personal tutoring – especially where it feels optional and not obviously relevant. Secondly, students remain uncertain about how academic staff, whom they associate with assessing their work and providing academic references, can help with more pastoral and wellbeing-related needs. And some, both students and staff, would argue this is not always their role either.
Therefore, there is a need for clarity and simplicity in roles, pathways and systems to address student and staff confusion around who does what, why hand-overs happen, and what mechanisms exist for support. Inclusivity in good student advising is not only about access, it’s also about trust, role clarity, and how safe students feel in the advising relationship.
And to enable this trade-offs are sometimes required to ensure workability and alignment, particularly in large institutions where designing policy isn’t only about implementing best practice, but managing what is feasible at scale. For instance, moving from a specific and measurable two office hours per week to just offering regular office hours, allowing staff flexibility. However, there are some non-negotiables that must be standardised for the system to work, like having a sense of whether a students’ reasonable adjustments are implemented across the board. Partly because there is evidence that this practice can be sporadic at best for many disabled students. Also for internal reporting and being able to demonstrate where staff are responding to student feedback.
Technology as an enabler
Good advising practice is enabled by technology. Without technology to help them understand their student cohorts, participant institutions in our research described it as difficult to enhance practice.
Technology works when it reduces staff cognitive load, makes pathways visible, supports extended availability (e.g. 24/7 provision), is part of a wider, integrated and holistic ecosystem of student support and closes feedback loops between academic and professional support.
Technology fails when it replaces professional judgement, obscures responsibility, or becomes a proxy for engagement. Advising is relational work, and technology should scaffold that work, not displace it. Clear workflows and referral pathways embedded into analytics platforms like Kortext stream can provide clarity to the process.
Professionalisation in real time
Advising in 2026 is becoming its own professional entity. Many institutions are moving pastoral support towards specialist, centrally coordinated roles, while retaining academic advising focused on curriculum, assessment, and learning. Where implemented well, this clarity has improved student confidence in support pathways and reduced staff anxieties.
Such models require careful leadership and oversight. Students must still feel seen and known by staff members, regardless of their job title. Advisors must still understand disciplinary contexts and academics must not abdicate responsibility for student development altogether.
Support from senior leadership is also vital to ensure oversight of this significant culture shift for many staffers. Guidance and backing from senior teams enable consistency of the student experience and can provide the resource allocation needed to fund the newly professionalised advisory roles.
The return‑on‑investment argument is valuable when aiming for senior leader buy-in as mproving advising systems (including technology) can reduce student dropout and protect tuition fee income.
These shifts help normalise boundaries through clear role definitions, training on ethical limits and referral thresholds, and messaging that ‘doing less’ can mean doing better. Refining “good” can help create a culture where student-centred does not mean staff having no boundaries. Advising that builds student agency, rather than dependency, requires restraint as much as care. Too little support is damaging. Too much can be equally so.
The challenge of evaluating well
Evaluation is critical to understanding what works in student advising and justifying hard won investment, yet it remains the area with the fewest answers. Metrics like the NSS and TEF provide blunt signals but struggle to capture how advising contributes to student development. Micro-level impacts (a timely referral, a changed decision, increased confidence) are real but hard to evidence, meaning that it is often hard to isolate why students respond as they do.
Emerging sector work (e.g. through the UKAT Evaluation SIG) is beginning to explore shared outcomes for advising, longitudinal perspectives beyond graduation and more creative qualitative evidence of impact at both individual and institutional levels. While the full impact of advising may never be fully quantifiable, institutions must still be clear about their objectives and honest about what they can evidence.
The UKAT panel discussion repeatedly returned to the importance of collaboration: co‑design with students, clarity for staff, enabling technology, quality assurance, and leadership that treats advising as strategic, not symbolic.
If there is one lesson we can take away, it’s that advising systems improve when institutions stop treating them as inherited “personal tutoring” and start treating them as designed, testable, evaluable systems built around purpose, roles, and pathways.
In current conditions, that may be the most radical lesson of all.
The authors would like to thank colleagues at all institutions participating in the Kortext student advising project.
To discover how Kortext stream can enhance your institution’s student advising activity, book a demonstration.
