When the Times ran a piece in late May under the headline “University will make all students go on work placement”, it had the feel of a significant policy announcement.
This was a Russell Group vice-chancellor breaking ranks with the traditional academic purity of his peers and demanding that every student, history graduate or chemical engineer alike, leaves campus with practical experience baked in.
Duncan Ivison’s framing was brisk and quotable, the ambition seemed clear, and the story spread across the sector at speed.
The actual picture, once you dig into Manchester’s own strategy documents, is both more interesting and more complicated than the Times presented it.
What Manchester is doing is not primarily a placement mandate. It is a ten-year curriculum redesign, running to 2035, built around something the university calls “partner-enabled learning” – a deliberately broad category that includes service learning, consultancy-style industry projects, co-designed community briefs, school outreach, cultural collaborations, and yes, placements, but only as one option among many.
The formal 2035 strategy says every student will work with employers, public bodies and community organisations “as part of their course for credit.” That is a significant commitment. It is also one that, depending on how it is implemented, could mean very different things to different students.
For SUs, the Manchester story is less interesting as a placement debate and more interesting as a question about what counts in a degree.
What Manchester is actually doing
The Institute of Teaching and Learning pages that sit behind the public strategy are candid about where the project currently is. Manchester is still working through the terminology – “partner-enabled learning”, “partner-involved learning”, “experiential learning” and “service learning” are related but not interchangeable, and the university is mapping current provision across its schools and faculties before it can define what a universal requirement would actually look like.
The questions it is asking itself include whether partner-enabled activity should be experiential and active, clearly structured around learning outcomes, embedded into the curriculum, compulsory, credit-bearing on all programmes, and linked to structured reflection. The fact that these are still live questions tells you that the 2035 ambition is real but the operational design is not yet settled.
The leadership architecture is visible and relatively senior. Jenn Hallam is vice-president for teaching, learning and students. Rebecca Hodgson, associate vice-president for curriculum and quality, leads taught portfolio development, curriculum reviews and assessment reform, with employability, sustainability and social responsibility as core graduate outcomes. Sarah Dyer, associate vice-president for teaching excellence and innovation, is explicitly linked to integrating AI and partner-enabled learning into curriculum and assessment. This is not a working group buried in a faculty – it has institutional seniority behind it.
A January 2026 all-colleague town hall confirmed that the first three years are about setting foundations – academic advising, curriculum, assessment, module structures, support, and consistency at scale. The framing in that transcript is more specific than the public strategy, describing “a really USP curriculum where every student for credit gets to work with an employer or gets to work with a business or with a community.” That is a credit-bearing curriculum matter, not a careers service bolt-on.
Some of the existing models show what the future might look like. The Justice Hub sees undergraduate law students deliver free legal advice under qualified supervision. Dentistry students provide treatment through local partner organisations.
The BNY Future of Work Alliance – a five-year, £5 million partnership – converts live operational challenges into structured, student-led academic projects.
The micro-internship programme, run through Practera, places students in virtual two-week work-based learning experiences involving real clients and real projects.
These are not the same as a conventional placement year, and in some disciplines the model will look nothing like one.
The equality gap
The Times framing – “students feel more confident describing their relevant skills,” “placements likely to take place during the summer term after exams” – should set off alarm bells for anyone who has spent time thinking about who a universal experiential learning requirement reaches.
Research is consistent on this point – students facing major financial difficulties are dramatically less satisfied with their academic experience than those who are financially comfortable, working students are already averaging 50 hours a week across study and employment, and the assumption of “summer after exams” availability collapses immediately when you factor in students who work to supplement household income, students with caring responsibilities, students who cannot afford to remain in Manchester unpaid, and international students whose visa conditions interact in complicated ways with work-based activity.
Manchester does have an equity mitigation mechanism, but it is currently inadequate for the scale of what is being proposed. The Work Experience Bursary Scheme for 2025/26 offers up to £250 per academic year for most students, or up to £1,000 for those receiving the full maintenance loan, the Manchester Bursary, or the Undergraduate Access Scholarship.
It can cover travel, accommodation, and dependent care, but it explicitly excludes placements that form part of a degree programme – which is precisely what partner-enabled learning is intended to become. A universal credit-bearing curriculum requirement with a bursary that excludes credit-bearing activity is not a coherent equity strategy.
The comparison with European practice makes this sharper. In Luxembourg, placements of four weeks or longer that are part of a curriculum must pay at least 30 per cent of the social minimum wage by law. In France, there is a statutory minimum gratification for supervised internships, set at €4.50 per hour from January 2026.
Manchester’s current model has no equivalent floor, no minimum payment expectation, and no published partner quality standard. The micro-internship programme involves 25 hours of unpaid work across two weeks. That is a different proposition for a student working 20 hours a week in a supermarket to cover rent than it is for a student with a comfortable parental contribution and no dependants.
What the rest of Europe can teach us
Manchester is, in effect, attempting to build from scratch something that already exists at scale across European higher education – and the European evidence is instructive about what makes it work and what makes it fail.
Across the systems that do this well – Twente’s module-based industry project structure, Finland’s universities of applied sciences, Škoda Auto University’s mandatory paid placements, Luxembourg’s legally mandated mobility semester – there are common features that the Manchester model currently lacks.
The credit architecture is settled before implementation, not during it. The payment expectations are legal minimums, not discretionary bursaries. The partner quality standards are defined and enforced. The activity is structured around learning outcomes rather than employer benefit. And critically, where the system is student-facing, student bodies have a formal constitutional role in shaping it – not just consultative involvement, but governance with teeth.
This European compilation from our Wonkhe’s SU study tours makes another point that is easy to miss. The subject association or faculty union, rather than the central institution, is frequently the organising unit for careers and applied learning in systems that do this well.
At KTH in Stockholm, at ETH Zürich, at Twente, at Linköping – the mechanism that makes employer relationships work at scale is trust between students and their disciplinary peers, not a central careers service mandate.
Manchester’s model, by contrast, is being driven top-down from the vice-chancellor’s office. That is not necessarily wrong, but it is worth noting that the systems that make this work sustainably tend to have student ownership embedded in the architecture, not bolted on afterwards.
So what does this mean for SUs?
Manchester’s SU is not mentioned anywhere in the public documentation around the 2035 strategy or the partner-enabled learning project. That is not a definitive statement about what is happening internally – there may well be engagement that has not surfaced publicly. But it is a useful signal about the default mode of a ten-year curriculum redesign, which is to treat it as an academic and operational matter.
SUs at any university doing curriculum work should be asking questions, while operational design is being settled and before credit tariffs, quality standards, and equity mechanisms are locked in.
The first is the governance question. Is the SU represented on the bodies that are making decisions about what partner-enabled learning looks like, what it counts for, which partners qualify, and how student welfare is protected during it? If the answer is “we’re consulted,” the follow-up question is whether consultation happens before decisions are made or after. The difference matters enormously when you’re designing credit frameworks that will affect every programme in the university.
The second is the equity question. What is the university’s plan for students who cannot participate in unpaid or low-paid externally partnered activity without financial hardship – and is that plan actually adequate for a universal curriculum requirement?
A bursary that excludes the very activity it is meant to support is not an answer. SUs should be pushing for minimum payment floors, clear partner obligations around expenses and dependent care, and genuine flexibility for working students, student parents, and disabled students who cannot complete activity in the formats currently being piloted.
The third is the quality question. Who decides whether a partner is providing a genuine learning experience rather than free labour dressed up in learning outcome language? In healthcare, the principle of “supernumerary status” – that students should not be counted as part of the workforce when on a learning placement – is frequently violated in practice because organisations are short-staffed and students are convenient.
That risk does not disappear when you move the activity into a business school project or a community consultancy brief. SUs need to be involved in setting and monitoring the quality standards that distinguish learning from extraction.
The fourth is the representation question that runs underneath all of this. Manchester is planning a significant curriculum shift that will change the experience of every undergraduate and postgraduate taught student by 2035. Our “Doing Better, Getting Better” framework for student rights argues that students should have a legal entitlement to participate in curriculum design and review – not as a nice-to-have, but as a core governance right.
A curriculum redesign is exactly the kind of process that right is designed to shape. If SUs are not at the table when the credit architecture is being designed, it will be invited to endorse something that was built without it.
None of this is an argument against what Manchester is attempting. The ambition – that every student leaves with demonstrated experience of applying their learning in a real-world context, across communities, organisations, and disciplines – is genuinely aligned with what the evidence says students need and what European systems show is possible.
The issue is whether it gets built in a way that is equitable, student-governed, and genuinely educationally coherent, or whether it becomes a well-intentioned top-down redesign that works well for the students who were already going to be fine and creates new burdens for those who were not.
Read more
Manchester’s 2035 full strategy, including the partner-enabled learning commitment
Manchester’s teaching and learning page on the LEAP programme
Manchester social responsibility pages on community-based teaching and service learning
Manchester micro-internships programme (Practera)
Manchester Work Experience Bursary Scheme terms and conditions
Luxembourg mandatory internship pay regime (stages obligatoires)
France statutory minimum gratification for curriculum internships
