Student transition into university shouldn’t be a handover

Every September, universities invest enormous effort in welcoming new students.

We organise induction weeks, campus tours, information fairs and skills sessions, all designed to help students navigate university life.

Yet a few weeks later, familiar questions emerge. Why are students still unsure what is expected of them? Why do some struggle to manage independent study? Why do they discover support only after they need it?

Perhaps the problem is not that universities are doing too little. Perhaps transition starts too late.

That was one of the clearest messages from a recent event hosted by Manchester Metropolitan University’s Faculty of Business and Law through its Innovation and Teaching Excellence Learning Lab. The event brought together colleagues from sixth forms, sixth form colleges, further education colleges and the university to explore how we can better prepare students for success in higher education.

What made the discussion particularly valuable was not simply that different sectors were represented. It was how quickly participants moved beyond the idea of transition as a university problem.

The prevailing view was that the move into higher education is too often structured as a handover: students leave one institution and become the responsibility of another. For learners, however, education is a continuous journey. Our systems do not always reflect that.

What colleges told us

Conversations with local college colleagues highlighted several important differences between the environments students leave and the one they enter.

The first is independence. Students may arrive with strong subject knowledge and substantial experience of assessment, but the organisation of learning can change considerably. University often requires students to manage more of their own time, interpret less structured assessment briefs and decide independently when and how to seek help. For students accustomed to regular milestones, frequent feedback or tightly structured tasks, that shift can be significant.

The lesson is not that students are insufficiently independent. It is that independence is developmental. If universities expect students to manage their learning differently, we need to make those expectations visible and scaffold the transition rather than assume students will immediately understand a new academic culture.

A second theme was the hidden curriculum. Higher education relies on many conventions that are obvious to those already inside it but far less obvious to someone encountering university for the first time: how to communicate with lecturers, what “critical analysis” looks like, how much independent study is expected, when to ask for support, and how to interpret feedback.

Colleges can help students anticipate some of these differences, but universities also have a responsibility to explain them explicitly.

This creates an opportunity for much closer collaboration. Rather than each institution developing its own transition messages in isolation, colleges and universities could identify the points of greatest discontinuity and agree what students most need to understand before and after enrolment.

AI exposes the limits of a handover model

Artificial intelligence provided a particularly useful example of why this matters.

Students are already using generative AI before they arrive at university. In 2026, 95 per cent of students reported using AI in at least one way and 94 per cent had used generative AI to support assessed work. The question is no longer whether students use these tools, but whether they have developed the judgement to use them critically, ethically and effectively.

College colleagues highlighted an important constraint. Sixth forms and further education providers often operate within externally prescribed curricula and qualification frameworks, giving them less freedom to redesign assessment or embed AI literacy than universities may have. At the same time, universities may assume that incoming students already possess sophisticated digital and AI capabilities.

That mismatch should prompt a different conversation. AI literacy cannot simply be handed from one sector to another. There is scope for shared guidance, common language around ethical and critical use, and better dialogue about what students are learning before university and what universities will expect from them afterwards.

Let’s give transition an extension

The discussion also challenged the idea that welcome week can carry the weight we place on it.

We would never design a module by delivering everything students might need in a single week and expect them to retain it all. Yet induction often works on precisely that assumption.

The context in which students encounter that information also makes this model increasingly unrealistic. Nearly half of students now commute rather than live on campus, many face significant financial pressures, and around one in four report a diagnosed mental health condition.

In 2026, 65 per cent of full-time undergraduates were in paid employment during term time, working an average of nearly 14 hours a week. Combined with study, this brought their weekly commitments to 44.2 hours – well above the 36.6-hour average working week of a full-time employee. At the same time, average independent study fell to 11.1 hours per week, its lowest level since the Student Academic Experience Survey began measuring it. For students balancing study with work, commuting and other pressures, transition cannot depend on absorbing everything at the point of arrival.

Support needs to be timely, repeated and connected to the moments when students actually need it.

Seen in this context, transition is better understood as a process that begins before enrolment and continues through the first year. That means giving students information when it becomes relevant, rather than front-loading it before they have the context to use it.

At Manchester Met, extended transition already aims to provide bite-sized information and support at the points when students need it. The roundtable at our event suggested that this could go further by involving schools and colleges more deliberately in shaping the transition journey.

Partner up

Participants generated a practical set of possibilities: shared transition resources; clearer and more consistent messages about assessment, finance, support and university expectations; collaborative AI guidance; staff exchanges; campus visits; and opportunities for prospective students to speak with current undergraduates before enrolment.

None of these ideas is especially radical. Their value lies in joining them up.

The Greater Manchester FE/HE Leaders Group has similarly argued for clearer pathways, stronger alignment between providers and more coordinated action across the learner journey.

Our roundtable brought that principle to life at a practical level. It showed how much can be gained when educators stop asking, “How do we prepare students once they arrive?” and instead ask, “How do we prepare and support the same learners together?”

This shift matters because it changes the starting assumption. Students do not need to be “fixed” for university. They need clear bridges between different educational environments, expectations and ways of learning.

The next step is therefore not another layer of induction. It is a more connected transition ecosystem in which schools, colleges and universities see themselves as partners with shared responsibility for student success.

Student transition starts long before welcome week. Our partnerships should too.