Education

Higher and further education institutions face financial pressure on several fronts, with frozen fees, volatile international recruitment and rising costs. Professional services are often organised faculty by faculty, so the same task is done in different ways across one campus, and students are passed between offices to get a simple answer. Peaks such as clearing, enrolment and results day stretch every team at once.

We help institutions look at professional services as a whole. We map how students and staff actually get things done, from applying and enrolling to asking for support or claiming expenses, and find where the work is duplicated or bounced between teams. We then help design shared service models that keep specialist expertise close to academic departments while handling routine requests consistently, often through a single front door for student enquiries.

We pay close attention to the people side of change in universities, where consultation, academic governance and long-standing ways of working all matter. Our training team often runs improvement courses for professional services staff alongside the consulting work, so the institution builds its own capability. Clients typically see faster responses to student enquiries, fewer handoffs in core processes, and savings of 10 to 20 per cent in professional services costs, reinvested in teaching and student support.