Students should be partners in mergers, not subjects or consumers

Advance HE’s new resource on Governing and leading merger and strategic transformation: Insights and approaches in HE appears in a context where structural change has moved from abstract possibility to active conversation.

The Kent and Greenwich multi-university group announcement joins a steady stream of announcements and rumours about mergers, federations and joint ventures at varying stages of conception and completion.

Co-created with a steering group drawn from AHUA, CUC, Guild HE, Independent HE and Universities UK, with independent advice from senior figures at City St George’s, Shakespeare Martineau and the Department for Education, the resource is clearly intended to become the reference document for Boards and executive teams navigating what almost everyone now accepts will be a multi-year period of structural consolidation.

It is extensively reviewed, carefully structured, and grounded in a philosophy the authors describe as “radical collaboration.”

There is a lot to welcome in it. There is also, on close reading, a big gap in the middle of it – one that matters for whether the mergers that follow will deliver the outcomes that merging institutions tell themselves they are pursuing.

I might summarise that gap as “nothing about us without us.”

Here come old flat-top, he come grooving up slowly

The resource organises the journey from initial strategic exploration to legal merger or transfer into three phases – decision shaping, decision making, and decision taking – each with a set of milestones and a framing of the roles and responsibilities of governing bodies and executive leadership teams at each point.

Phase 1 covers institutional self-assessment, environmental scanning and scenario planning, shared vision development, and strategic options evaluation. Phase 2 moves into early legal considerations, pausing and exit strategy, cultural compatibility and social engagement, regulatory and compliance mapping, and finalising the business case.

Phase 3 then runs from joint oversight and transparent appointments through legal execution, programme management and communications, cultural integration and academic harmonisation, to partners in change – ending, as it does, at “Day 1 legal merger or transfer.”

Each phase identifies the outcomes to be achieved, the risks to be managed, and the mitigations to be deployed. Each milestone sets out activities, risks, role descriptions for governors and leaders, the decisions to be taken – distinguishing binary from emergent ones – and the resources that might help.

The whole thing is aligned with the Advance HE Governor Competencies Map and the Framework for Leading in HE, which gives it a coherent place in the existing sector governance infrastructure. It’s, in other words, the sort of document that a Board can sit down with, work through methodically, and use to structure its work.

The resource is also clear about what it’s not. It doesn’t provide legal, financial, or regulatory advice. It doesn’t address governmental or regulatory challenges directly. It’s a governance and leadership resource, authored for Boards and executive teams, focused on the decisions those audiences need to take and the ways of working they need to adopt.

The three-phase architecture maps onto how Boards actually experience these processes, and the discipline of distinguishing binary from emergent decisions at each milestone is a useful corrective to the tendency for everything in merger discussions to become either a red line or a matter of goodwill.

The pausing and exit strategy milestone in Phase 2 is interesting – most sector writing on mergers assumes forward momentum and treats “stop” as a failure state rather than a managed decision with a plotted route back to constructive engagement.

And the Phase 2.5 framing of the business case as a joint product developed together with the partner institution pushes back helpfully against the instinct for each Board to develop its own case in parallel, which the international evidence suggests produces sustained divergence long after Day 1.

A Board that worked through the resource methodically would conduct a more disciplined and more self-aware merger process than one that didn’t. The question that follows, though, is whether the framework adequately addresses the people for whom the merger is ultimately happening – and that’s a different question from whether it helps Boards govern themselves.

He say, “I know you, you know me”

Students aren’t absent from the resource. They appear repeatedly – as a constituency whose wellbeing is to be safeguarded, as a source of “lived experience” to be inquired into, as the subjects of impact statements, as recipients of communications, and as the population whose outcomes Phase 3.4 names as requiring protection.

The authors clearly care about students and have tried to include them throughout.

The question is how students are included rather than whether. And for that question, it’s worth borrowing a diagnostic tool from the Scottish student engagement tradition – the student partnership staircase developed by Student Partnerships in Quality Scotland (sparqs), set out in Models for exploring partnership by Simon Varwell in the International Journal for Students as Partners in 2021.

The staircase offers a progressive scale of four student roles, rising from “information provider” (completer of surveys) through “actor” (collector and analyst of feedback) and “expert” (recognised as having expertise in learning) to “partner” (someone in authentic and constructive dialogue).

The tool doesn’t impose a fixed definition of partnership – Varwell is clear that sparqs’ approach is to enable stakeholders to create their own approaches rather than to prescribe – but it gives anyone thinking about student positioning a vocabulary for distinguishing between rungs that are easily conflated.

Applied to the Advance HE framework, the pattern is pretty bleak. In Phase 1, the confidentiality architecture – the “small, confidential group” named in milestone 1.3 – means that the vast majority of students, including most students’ union (SU) officers and student representatives, aren’t yet aware the conversation is happening.

The sense-making work of shared vision development is done by governors and executives, with any student governors present as Board members rather than as conduits to the wider student body. Students sit at step one – providers of information through historical data sources like National Student Survey (NSS) returns, satisfaction surveys, and institutional records – or below it, depending on how confidentiality is operationalised.

In Phase 2, the framework edges toward step two – actor – in the cultural compatibility milestone 2.3, which imagines students as people who produce “trust signals and friction points,” participate in dialogue agreements, and receive “what we heard/what we changed” communications. There’s real recognition here that students might generate organised insights, not just raw data.

But the framing stops there. Step three – expert, recognised as having expertise in learning – is essentially absent across the document. Students don’t hold expertise that the institution lacks in the resource’s capability inventory. Their contribution is treated as experiential rather than expert.

External advisors, in contrast, are named, their expertise is specified, their contribution is structurally integrated, and Phase 3.5 is in fact titled “Partners in change” with that term of art reserved for specialist external firms and regulators. The vocabulary of partnership, in this framework, is claimed by people other than students.

Phase 3 is where the pattern really tells. In the execution phase, the communications architecture reverts to one-way transmission – “message house,” “myth busting,” “spokespeople,” “cadence” – with feedback mechanisms that monitor student response rather than invite dialogue. Students are recipients of communications rather than participants in decisions.

The Phase 3.4 line about “facilitating students’ and student representative bodies’ leadership of the two student communities coming together” flashes briefly at step two, but it’s isolated within a phase otherwise dominated by top-down transmission.

The trajectory across the three phases is, in other words, downward rather than upward. Students are at their most engaged within the framework’s limited terms during Phase 2 and least engaged during Phase 3 execution – which is precisely the phase when, on the international evidence, sustained partnership is the protection against the things that go wrong.

One thing I can tell you is, you got to be free

The sparqs staircase isn’t the only way to think about student positioning – Varwell notes it’s a facilitative tool rather than a prescriptive one. The more pointed concern is that the Advance HE resource has no equivalent diagnostic at all.

Without a vocabulary for distinguishing between information-provider, actor, expert, and partner positions, the framework defaults to the lowest-effort rung and doesn’t notice it has done so. That default has costs, and the international evidence I assembled a while ago across the last two decades of European university mergers gives us a reasonable sense of what those costs are.

The most obvious is the time horizon problem. The Advance HE framework ends at Day 1 legal merger or transfer, but the research literature is consistent that the consequences of merger for students unfold over a decade – with Aalto University’s international ranking improvements taking five to seven years to materialise, Tampere students describing a “loss of soul” years after formal merger, and Duisburg-Essen student satisfaction remaining below sector average more than two decades in. The case studies span Finland, Denmark, France, Germany, Sweden, and Ireland, and they tell the same story.

Related is the absence of what the international evidence and practitioner literature consistently identify as the most important single governance principle in multi-institution harmonisation – the levelling-up principle. When two institutions bring different policies, service levels, and facilities together, the natural institutional instinct under financial pressure is to standardise to the more restrictive or cheaper version.

Aix-Marseille adopted the most restrictive option across four merging institutions. Danish mergers saw academic regulations harmonised to what researchers have called a “restrictive common denominator.” At Tallinn University, standardisation efforts often reduced rather than enhanced service levels. The levelling-up principle insists that where one institution’s students currently have access to a better service, standard, or policy, the merger should extend that access rather than remove it.

The word “levelling” doesn’t appear anywhere in the Advance HE resource. Phase 3.4 names the balance between standardisation and local identity but frames it as a cultural question – crests, traditions, and names – rather than a question about service standards – mitigating circumstances policies, library hours, counselling waiting times, and assessment regulations.

Without the principle built in as a decision gate, each harmonisation choice becomes a case-by-case judgement under cost pressure, which is how the restrictive-common-denominator outcome gets produced by well-governed processes.

There’s also a cohort fairness problem the framework doesn’t engage with. The students enrolled during a merger transition are in a structurally different position from both the cohorts that preceded them – those who graduated from a stable institution – and those that will follow – who will apply knowingly to the merged form. The transition cohort applied to one thing and is receiving another.

The Advance HE Phase 2.5 business case milestone does name “student/staff impact statements” and talks about “phasing of value” and “early wins,” but the framing is about managing the transition smoothly rather than recognising an ethical position that generates specific entitlements. This cohort is, in effect, being asked to absorb disruption in service of benefits they won’t see, and the framework doesn’t give Boards a way to think about that.

He bag production, he got walrus gumboot

The framework is also quiet on who, specifically, is affected. International students – whose visa status, UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) compliance, degree recognition in home countries, and targeted support provision can all be materially affected by institutional identity change – appear nowhere in the text.

Students on professional programmes – medics, trainee teachers, engineers, architects, lawyers, and clinical students – face compounded risks around placement networks, professional body accreditation, and graduate qualification recognition that generic governance advice doesn’t capture.

There’s also a question about what the framework means by legacy. The phrase “honour legacy where appropriate” appears in Phase 3.4, but read in context, “legacy” there is overwhelmingly institutional – the histories, traditions, and symbols that belonged to the pre-merger organisations as corporate entities.

Students have their own legacies, which are different in kind – a student who applied to Institution A in 2024 carries a legacy of expectations the institution took their money and their UCAS acceptance on. Those expectations include, at minimum, the degree title that will appear on their certificate.

The phrase “degree title” doesn’t appear anywhere in the Advance HE resource, which is remarkable given that the name on the graduation certificate is the single most identity-bearing artefact of the whole transition, and the consumer protection implications of changing it for mid-course students are non-trivial under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (DMCC Act).

Finally, there’s the transparency problem the framework surfaces but doesn’t interrogate. Phase 1 is confidential by design. Phase 2 builds in confidentiality agreements, exclusivity provisions, and data-room access controls. This is operationally necessary.

But the framework’s own commitment to inclusive decision-making and psychological safety sits in real tension with a design that excludes most students from the decision-shaping phase. By the time consultation opens, the architecture is largely set – which is exactly the pattern the international evidence identifies as producing “fait accompli” consultation outcomes. Naming the tension is half the governance work. The resource doesn’t quite do it.

Hold you in his armchair, you can feel his disease

There’s a related question the framework largely sidesteps. In a reflective blog published ten years after the UCL/IoE merger, Paul Temple – formerly of the Institute of Education, now honorary associate professor at its successor – described what was lost when the IoE became a faculty of UCL. It’s worth noting that UCL/IoE is itself one of the case studies the Advance HE resource cites.

The IoE had been, in his account, an almost-nearly-perfect university institution – about 400 academic staff, big enough to matter but small enough for colleagues to be on nodding acquaintance with each other, intellectually coherent around the study of education while drawing on a wide range of disciplines, all packed into a few Bloomsbury buildings.

That combination of scale, intellectual connectivity, and physical proximity produced what Temple, drawing on Robert Putnam, calls generalised reciprocity – the kind of social capital where people you don’t personally know will probably help you because that’s how things work around here. It meant, as Temple puts it, that things got done quickly without lengthy discussion. Academic registrars could bend admissions rules for unconventional candidates because they trusted the colleagues making the case.

That’s governance-by-trust, and it matters in hard practical ways – it’s what makes organisations efficient, responsive, and able to do the unusual things that make them distinctive.

Temple’s observation is that mergers, even successful ones by most measures, tend to destroy this property through inattention rather than malice. The absorbed institution has to adopt the absorbing institution’s ways of working, which will typically be more bureaucratic because they’ve been designed for a larger and less intimate setting.

The leaders who negotiated the merger – and who made the implicit promises that preserved the distinctive culture – move on, and their successors inherit no particular obligation to honour those promises. What was a high-trust, low-bureaucracy environment becomes a low-trust, high-process one, and things that used to happen quickly start taking months.

This is also, incidentally, another argument for the Phase 4 covenant architecture identified earlier – because the people who made the promises aren’t the people who’ll be asked to keep them, and governance frameworks need to codify what trust used to do.

This is a staff reflection, but it translates directly to the student experience – and in ways that matter most for the things students report as most important to their wellbeing. Belonging, community, pastoral support, mental health provision, the continuity of staff who know students by name, the peer networks that make academic life workable, the academic societies that provide identity within large institutions – all of these depend on scale, proximity, and continuity, and all are damaged by precisely the kinds of integration moves that look efficient at a governance level.

The Advance HE framework doesn’t help Boards to distinguish between functions that benefit from centralisation – back-office efficiency, regulatory compliance, capital strategy, research infrastructure, IT systems, and shared procurement – and functions that benefit from deliberate preservation at component level – belonging, community, pastoral support, mental health provision, and local decision-making about the things that affect daily student life.

Its Phase 3.4 language about the “balance between standardisation and local identity” reads as cultural – crests, traditions, naming – rather than functional. The functional question is the one that matters for whether merged institutions actually work for the people inside them, and treating it as a cultural matter obscures it.

The most successful multi-site European institutions tend to be those that are deliberate about this distinction. Small-scale student communities, faculty-level pastoral infrastructure, and local decision-making about things students actually encounter in their daily lives are often preserved or even strengthened, while shared services, research strategy, and quality frameworks are centralised.

The distinction reflects something more than a pragmatic split between efficiency and local feeling – it’s a recognition that different functions have different scale characteristics, and governance architecture should respond accordingly. A framework that treated this as a substantive governance question rather than a cultural one would give Boards a sharper tool for deciding what a merger should and shouldn’t change.

Got to be a joker, he just do what he please

The resource will shape practice. That’s both its purpose and its risk. Boards facing structural decisions over the next several years will reach for it, work through its phases, and govern themselves accordingly – and a sector doing merger governance without a shared reference document produces worse outcomes than one with a shared framework, even an incomplete one.

But frameworks embed the assumptions their authors make about who belongs in the room, and the Advance HE framework’s assumptions about students are consistently those of a constituency to be managed rather than a partnership to be worked with.

Which brings us to nothing about us without us.

If they don’t treat students as partners, Boards will miss things. Students know things about their experience that governors and executives don’t – their contribution is one of expertise about how institutions actually function for the people inside them, not merely raw data to be mined for “lived experience.” A governance process that treats students as an input to be consulted rather than a partner in the work will fail to surface the problems that matter most.

The European evidence base is, in large part, a record of institutions discovering post-Day 1 what students could have told them before Day 1, if anyone had been asking in a way that allowed the answer to shape the architecture.

There’s a principled argument too. Higher education isn’t a service delivered to passive recipients – it’s a community that students are members of, with standing to shape the terms of their membership. Mergers change those terms fundamentally. Deciding those terms without the people whose terms they are is a category error about what universities are for.

And the tone set during a merger echoes through decades of the institution’s culture. If a new institution is founded on the principle that students are customers or subjects rather than partners – consulted when convenient, communicated with when necessary, managed when difficult – the resulting institution shouldn’t be surprised when that’s how students continue to experience it years later.

Merger is when institutional culture gets written. The rhetorical commitments the resource makes about radical collaboration and inclusive decision-making are genuine, but they’ll only survive contact with practice if the framework actively requires Boards to hold themselves to them – and that means treating students as partners in the architectural sense, rather than as interested parties to be heard at appropriate moments.

There’s bags of practice to borrow. Universities should give SUs voting seats – not just consultation roles – on all merger governance structures from the moment a merger is announced, fund dedicated SU merger capacity as straightforward risk mitigation rather than an optional extra, and commit to harmonising policies and services upward to the highest existing standard rather than the lowest common denominator.

They should guarantee course continuity and protect students from additional costs, ensure all professional support services are ring-fenced during integration rather than treated as early rationalisation targets, and communicate clearly and proactively with students throughout – including in relevant languages for international students.

Funding for SU merger costs will help, and at least starting with the principle of equity of student experience across all campuses will reassure. Student experience only survives mergers intact when institutions treat it as a structural priority backed by student leadership and resources and accountability, not a rhetorical commitment buried in a business case.

The cost of leaving this unaddressed isn’t borne by the authors or by the governance community. It’s borne by the students who happen to be enrolled during the transition, and by the generations of students who will inherit whatever institutional culture gets built in the process. Version 2 of the framework please.