The challenges facing our sector are well documented.
Universities have been navigating years of financial pressure, changing student expectations, increasing regulatory complexity, geopolitical uncertainty and growing demands to demonstrate impact for students, employers and communities.
Against this backdrop, it would have been easy to focus solely on short-term pressures.
Instead, we chose to focus on the long term.
Today, as we officially launch the London and South East University Group (LASE) – bringing together the University of Greenwich and the University of Kent as the UK’s first multi-university group – we can reflect on what we have learned over the last year.
Together, our institutions span South East London, Medway and Kent, serving diverse communities with different opportunities and challenges. By combining our strengths through a new university group model, we can create a stronger platform to widen access to higher education, address skills shortages, support economic growth and increase the impact of our teaching and research across the wider region.
Equally importantly, we can create greater opportunities for our students. From day one, students across the group have access to four campuses, additional facilities, libraries and can request access to support services at a location that works best for them. Over time, our scale will enable us to strengthen partnerships with employers, expand opportunities for collaboration, and deliver an even richer student experience.
We can also build greater capacity in areas where our institutions share common strengths and ambitions. Whether supporting health and wellbeing, driving innovation in food and sustainability, strengthening the creative industries or helping tackle wider societal challenges, we believe we can achieve more for our communities by working together than we could alone.
In short, LASE was created to respond to the challenges facing higher education as well as to make a bigger difference to the students, communities and region we exist to serve.
Our approach may not work for everyone, but it does create a model for universities considering a group structure, and we want to share our learnings to benefit others.
Do it for the right reasons
Perhaps the most important lesson is that collaboration should be driven by opportunity, not simply by necessity.
Much discussion about HE mergers starts from a position of difficulty. While sector challenges are real, a merger is not a solution to unresolved institutional problems.
From the outset, our conversations were centred on potential, not survival. We believed there was an opportunity to create something greater than the sum of its parts.
No amount of financial modelling, legal agreements or organisational design can compensate for a lack of trust between institutions. Long before formal due diligence began, significant effort was invested in building relationships, understanding each other’s perspectives and establishing shared principles and values.
For institutions considering collaboration, our advice is simple: start with purpose, build relationships and be honest about what you are trying to achieve.
Trust is fundamental and the fact that both vice-chancellors worked together and were always willing to have the difficult conversation made it far easier to achieve.
Governance can be a catalyst for transformation
Large-scale institutional change requires more than executive commitment. It requires governors willing to engage deeply with complexity, ask difficult questions, and provide confidence and challenge in equal measure.
Governing bodies at both institutions invested significant time in understanding the opportunities and risks associated with creating a new university group, while remaining focused on their responsibilities to students, staff and the long-term sustainability of their institutions.
Governance structures must be both robust and adaptable. Traditional governance arrangements are not always designed with innovative collaborative models in mind.
For institutions considering similar approaches, our advice would be to engage governing bodies early and meaningfully. Transformational change cannot be delegated to a small project team. Governors and executive leaders must develop a shared understanding of the vision, the challenges and the outcomes they are seeking to achieve. When that alignment exists, governance becomes a powerful source of momentum rather than merely a mechanism for oversight.
Communications and engagement are leadership responsibilities
One of the greatest temptations during a complex transformation is to wait until every detail is confirmed before communicating. In reality, staff and students often need communication most when there is uncertainty. Silence can quickly be filled by speculation, assumptions and misinformation.
Communications have been at the heart of the programme since the start.
We have prioritised regular engagement with staff, students, governors and external stakeholders. Engagement began well before the merger completed. We brought together executive leadership teams from both institutions, and extended those conversations to wider teams. We also delivered 18 engagement sessions over a three-month period across our four campus locations to more than 1,000 staff.
We also worked hard to create multiple opportunities for colleagues to engage with the process, ask questions and share feedback. Our all-staff sessions were complemented by regular written communications and direct engagement from us.
Visible leadership proved particularly important. People understandably look to leaders for direction during periods of change, and there is no substitute for being present, accessible and willing to engage with difficult questions. While we could not always provide immediate answers, we could explain what we knew, what we were still working through and how decisions would be made.
Engagement was never intended to be a one-way process. There have been occasions when colleagues challenged our assumptions, highlighted unintended consequences or told us that aspects of our approach were not landing in the way we had intended. Creating the space for honest feedback helped us refine our plans, improve our communications and better understand the concerns and priorities of different groups across our institutions.
That approach helped us navigate a period that inevitably contained ambiguity while maintaining confidence in the direction of travel. Most importantly, it reinforced a principle that will continue to guide LASE in the years ahead: people are more likely to support change when they feel informed, involved, listened to and part of shaping the future.
The legal completion of our merger on 1 August and the official launch of LASE are significant milestones. They represent the culmination of an extraordinary amount of work by staff, governors and partners. But they are milestones, not endpoints. The real measure of success will be what we deliver in the years ahead.
Higher education has a proud history of innovation. The challenges facing the sector today require that spirit of innovation more than ever. Collaboration will not be the answer for every institution, but we believe it should be part of the conversation.
Over the coming months, we will begin work on a blueprint for the sector, sharing in greater detail the lessons, challenges and insights from this first chapter of the LASE story.
As the first institutions to create a university group of this kind in the UK, we believe there is a responsibility to share openly not only what worked, but also the complexities we encountered along the way. We hope this blueprint will provide practical guidance for institutions exploring their own collaborative futures and contribute to a wider conversation about how higher education can innovate, adapt and thrive in the years ahead.
