What happened at Senate Summit 2026?

For years we’ve had a half-formed ambition to run something at the tail end of the summer – after the training tours, before welcome week – on the big education policy issues that officers will actually end up arguing about in the year ahead.

Every year we’ve collapsed before we got round to it. This year we didn’t, and so on Thursday a room full of sabbs from across England and Wales (and one from Edinburgh) joined us for the first Wonkhe SUs Senate Summit.

The Senate and academic board half of university governance is often deprioritised. There’s lavish attention paid to the corporate side – governance codes, student governor programmes, the works – and precious little for the officers who spend their year in academic board, quality committee, or student experience committee trying to work out what a paper on curriculum reform actually means for students.

So we wanted a day about content rather than process – one day where we could hand over the research and intel we’ve gathered over the past year.

Here we’ve looked at what we covered, with links to the slides from each session in case you couldn’t make it.

Starting with what assessment is for

Mack opened with the findings from the AI research we ran with SUs back in March. The headline stats are familiar – 92 per cent of undergraduates use AI, and 47 per cent now worry that their grades no longer reflect what they know – but the interesting bit sits underneath.

Students described six distinct uses, from search engine replacement and structural scaffolding through to outright production, and only the last is really a misconduct question. Blanket policies treat all six the same.

What students told us is diagnostic of the institution as much as of them. They use AI because the library search is poor, the assignment brief made no sense, and the personal tutor never replied.

Only 21 per cent said their course primarily rewards thinking and reasoning, and students who felt their course rewarded outputs used AI at double the rate of those who felt it rewarded understanding. Students who felt they belonged used it less, and for some disabled students it was “the best reasonable adjustment the university never gave me.”

The recommendations flow from that – verification moments, scrapping AI declaration forms that only the risk-tolerant lie on, asking what AI is compensating for, and treating peer learning as core provision. We also talked about why the sector may have misread students’ dislike of exams, most of which is about only getting one go.

In the Q&A, one delegate described a student who used AI purely to reorder research they’d already done themselves – “I built all the furniture, I just didn’t know where to put it in the room” – as a useful illustration of why scaffolding shouldn’t be treated as a misconduct issue.

Another asked how to make the case for this kind of nuance to academic boards and senates that are either purely metrics-obsessed or purely wedded to education for its own sake.

The suggestion was to stop relying on data alone and instead bring in short video testimony gathered from course reps outside the formal meeting structure, since that tends to shift sceptical rooms in a way statistics don’t.

Slides for this session are here.

Further reading from the session:

Where the careers service sits

Sharanya’s session on employability landed on the day Universities UK launched its future jobs strategy at its Nottingham Trent conference – a strategy that, as far as we can tell, involved no students in its development.

The graduate premium has fallen from around 80 per cent in 1999 to around 45 per cent now, yet in the US, Canada, and France it held or rose over the same period while participation grew. The culprits are stalled demand, employers who stopped training, and jobs that migrated to London.

Our own polling finds that the strongest predictor of career confidence is whether students feel part of a community and whether their course stretches them, which puts SUs closer to the biggest lever in the data than careers teams are.

The argument is to map provision against three tiers – what’s built into how the discipline is taught, what’s credit-bearing, and what’s optional – and push as much as possible out of the tier that only reaches students with free evenings. Departmental beats central, credited beats voluntary, and student-led beats staff-led almost everywhere we’ve looked in Europe.

There’s a list of things unions can start this term, from resourcing academic societies to run discipline-specific careers activity, to asking why almost nobody in the UK issues section 6.1 of the diploma supplement.

In the Q&A, one delegate asked how to get professional services and academic departments actually talking to each other, rather than assuming that coordination at senior leadership level trickles down to how a student experiences the university. The suggested fix was doing the counterfactual that most services never do – working out who isn’t engaging with anything at all – and telling that story the way you’d describe a confusing department store, since a service that only measures the people who already show up will always look like it’s working. Res Life reporting was offered as the cautionary example, since halls of residence will always show high belonging scores if nobody compares them with the commuter students nobody asked.

Slides for this session are here.

Further reading from the session:

Rights and remedies

Jim’s morning session was on the gap between what students are promised and what they get, and why so little of it ever surfaces.

Seventy per cent of students in OfS’s polling identified disruption to their studies, a quarter raised it informally, and far fewer did anything formal – because it takes too long, because they fear conflict and retribution, and above all because they don’t know what they’re entitled to.

The argument we wanted to get across is that too much of what should go down the complaint slot is going down the voice slot instead. Voice structures were built to make things better beyond a baseline, and when reps end up begging for things students are legally entitled to, someone can say no. That’s what makes library hours and modules so easy to cut.

With OfS’s proposed condition C6 due imminently – including a requirement to consult SUs on how universities tell students their rights – there’s a real opportunity to walk in and offer to help, and a strong case for making a written submission rather than relying on an officer having been in the room.

We also walked through the beta of knowyourstudentrights.com which covers around 900 rights across all four nations, and the pilots we’re running this semester for unions that want a version plugged into their own institution’s policies and promises.

In the Q&A, one delegate asked how to get their advice service properly involved in the rights pilots, since some advisers worry that giving students the tools to enforce their own rights undermines the advice function rather than extending it.

Another described successfully reframing the closure of a course facility as a breach of a specific legal right rather than a generic complaint, and the advice back was that naming the right rather than just objecting to the cut is what actually moves a university, even if it takes longer to land through an ombudsman.

Slides for this session are here.

Further reading from the session:

Friends, belonging, and being heard

After lunch Mack returned to our Friends with benefits polling – seven waves, 178 institutions, over 18,000 students – to argue that universities have built systems that produce loneliness at scale and then act surprised by the results.

Belonging has three strands – close friends, a place at the institution, and academic citizenship – and off-course friends can deliver most of the first two but none of the third. Anxiety is what stops people turning up, which is why buddy and social mentoring models outperform another welcome event.

The second half flipped to the difference between being asked and being heard. Around 54 per cent of students sit in a movable middle – consulted to death but unconvinced anything changes – and the fix is closing the loop at module level, being honest when the answer is no, and letting reps do the telling.

Slides for this session are here.

Further reading from the session:

What a degree really costs

Sharanya then took on the gap between the £9,535 on the course page and the £29,375 or so a three-year degree will actually cost once annual fee rises are counted.

Of 141 providers we looked at, only two warned applicants that the fee would rise, four in 10 gave no information about costs beyond tuition, and more than a quarter cut bursaries last year.

Since April 2025 an advertised fee is an invitation to purchase, inflation clauses have to be clear and tied to actual costs, and the CMA has direct fining powers – so this is a legal question as much as a moral one.

There are six things to take to the university, from fee clauses and international deposits to protecting hardship funds through the access and participation plan, and placement fees, where Salford, Edge Hill, and Middlesex have shown that charging the cap is a choice.

In the Q&A, one delegate asked how to raise C6 compliance failures without damaging an otherwise good relationship with senior management, and was told the safest route is a written submission during the university’s formal consultation with the union, since that’s far harder to wave off than an officer’s comment in a committee. Another raised the unfairness of unequal access to funded placements and study abroad within access and participation plan monitoring, since course teams and access teams rarely talk to each other despite sitting under the same plan – a gap that was met with the frank admission that most pro-vice-chancellors would be embarrassed if it were ever put to them directly.

Slides for this session are here.

Further reading from the session:

Beyond the lecture theatre

Mack closed his day with three groups that routinely vanish from academic board papers.

Placement students are enrolled but cut off, with a patchwork of fees and undocumented complaint routes, so a placement rights charter is the practical ask.

PGRs who teach now deliver large chunks of provision on everything from proper employment contracts to zero hours, with prep and marking allowances that are often fantasy.

And PGT dissertation supervision is a weak spot precisely because there’s usually no minimum standard to point at.

In the Q&A, one delegate asked whether a university using AI to mark essays could argue in front of a judge that this met its consumer protection duty of reasonable skill and care, and was told plainly that it could not, which risks opening the door to students challenging their marks on those grounds rather than the usual protection of academic judgement. Another questioned the claimed savings, pointing out that if AI does the marking and a member of staff still has to check it, the time and cost haven’t gone away so much as moved somewhere less visible.

Slides for this session are here.

Further reading from the session:

Whose degree is it anyway

Jim finished with Europe. The UK rejoins Erasmus from January at a cost of half a billion pounds, but plenty of universities have lost their Erasmus staff and haven’t signed the charter – so whether your students get the opportunity while students down the road do is, we’d argue, a rights issue.

Behind that sit European Higher Education Area commitments our ministers have signed and never delivered, including quality assurance standards that the TEF doesn’t meet.

The bit we most wanted people to take into curriculum reform conversations is credit. A business degree in Helsinki gives students choice over 42 per cent of it, Vilnius 33 per cent, St Gallen 13 per cent. Many of you are at universities where students choose nothing.

When academics and the centre row over who owns the credit, nobody argues for the student spending the time and the money – and there are examples all over Europe of recognising volunteering, leadership, and work-based learning inside the credit system rather than on top of it.

In the Q&A, one delegate asked whether the funding bands attached to the reformed exchange scheme would actually make a semester abroad viable, and was told that given how expensive UK student accommodation already is, even a lower band usually leaves students better off abroad, though real take-up depends on academics on each side actively maintaining the partnerships rather than the money alone.

Another asked how to raise the university’s readiness with senior leadership, and the answer combined the protection case – checking whether support for harassment and mental health abroad is any good before assuming it is – with the marketing case of being able to offer something a competitor down the road can’t.

A third asked how one institution had avoided charging the standard placement year fee, and was told it came down to a university deciding that the sum it was giving up was small next to the case it could make to disadvantaged applicants.

Slides for this session are here.

Further reading from the session:

What happens next

Lewis from NUS closed out the day up with a line worth keeping – if your university isn’t listening and is cutting the things students need, you don’t have a good relationship with it, however friendly the meetings are.

If you want to join the student rights pilots, or you’ve got thoughts on breaks, pace, or whether next year needs sandwiches, drop us a line.