Ireland's Turn: Familiar Pressure, Felt Differently

Third in a series on higher education across the UK, Ireland and Canada

This year's CAO round has just closed, and it's a good news story. This summer has seen a record number of applications, and thousands of students accepting offers to start in Irish higher education this autumn. It's an exciting time for those new students, and everyone working in higher education is preparing for what this academic year will bring. But challenges remain. With funding still catching up to demand and staff numbers barely moving, how do institutions ensure the capacity and quality to enrol, support and encourage those students?

This is the third piece in a series I've been writing on higher education across the UK, Ireland and Canada, and if there's one thread running through all three, it's this same tension between rising demand and the capacity to meet it. Three systems, three governments, three quite different ways of structuring and funding higher education, yet wherever I go, I find myself having a version of the same conversation.

The Short Version

From what I see, the underlying story is a simple one, even if living through it isn't. Budget 2026 brought welcome capital investment and a modest reduction in student fees, but the sector's own figures suggest a structural funding gap in the hundreds of millions hasn't closed. Students keep arriving in greater numbers each year. Staff numbers don't move at anything like the same pace. I think it's a story every institution in this sector will recognise, wherever they happen to sit.

I'm also struck by how much consolidation has happened in a very short space of time. Mergers, restructures, rebranding, bringing different campuses, cultures and course catalogues together is hard enough as a strategic exercise. Doing that while also trying to run a single, coherent student record across the whole institution is another job entirely, and my sense is that a lot of colleges are still quietly working through that.

Add to that a genuine housing crisis shaping where students can realistically study, and real pressure to expand quickly into the skills areas the country needs most, and it's a great deal for any institution to carry at once.

I can imagine what you think someone in my role will say next, but at Thesis SM, we know that none of this gets fixed by software alone. However, from what I've seen elsewhere, it gets a lot harder with the wrong systems underneath, and much easier with the right ones, especially if they talk to each other.

Where a Good SIS Actually Earns Its Keep

When money is this tight, I think a Student Information System stops being about a nicer screen for staff to look at. It becomes about capacity. In my experience, three things matter most.

1. Taking the busywork off people institutions can’t afford to lose. If teams are moving between spreadsheets and old interfaces just to answer where a student is in their journey, that’s skilled time spent on administration rather than on students. Fixing that matters, for the quality of student experience and the quality of the staff experience.
   
   
2. Letting compliance take care of itself. The annual HEA Student Records System return, QQI's programme validation and quality review cycles, and for merged institutions, often two or three legacy funding agreements running side by side. There's a lot to do, and the reporting only grows. I believe that information should come out of the system institutions already run day to day, rather than needing to be rebuilt every time a new question lands.
   
   
3. Growing without growing headcount to match is hard. This is what has been happening in recent years, and right now, in real time. Institutions are working through a record CAO round, with acceptances landing through into September, on much the same registry and admissions headcount as last year. In my view, that only works if the platform underneath can flex to meet a seasonal surge, rather than needing a project every time volumes rise.

Where Thesis SM Fits

This is exactly the context Thesis SM capabilities are built to support. We work with institutions that don’t have large in-house development teams to hold their systems together, which describes most of this sector outside a handful of the largest players. What we hear back consistently from the institutions we work with:

• One student record, from application through to alumni, so registry, student services and academic teams aren't reconciling different versions of the truth, particularly useful when a new intake is arriving all at once.
  
  
• Configuration not customisation, so a new programme or funding rule can go live without a development queue. No code/low code also means this frees up technical colleagues' time.
  
  
• Being able to run large batch processes to deal with the high volume of queries, updates and outputs. Combined with the ability for applicants and students to self-serve where practical, this takes real pressure off a busy team.
  
  
• Reporting design that already reflects the returns institutions have to make, so compliance is something the system does, not something someone does to the system.

None of that makes the funding picture any easier. However, it does mean core student administration stops being the thing holding everyone else back, this September and beyond. It's also important to recognise that not everything that matters here is about meeting a regulatory requirement. Some of the features our clients value most are the ones nobody actually asked us to build.

An interface staff genuinely find easy to use, so training a new starter takes days rather than weeks. A proper 360-degree view of every student, one screen rather than several systems and a call to another department, so a query is resolved in the first conversation rather than the third. And programme building that takes hours rather than months, which matters a great deal when a merger brings different course catalogues together, or a new programme needs to launch to a tight deadline.

If any of this sounds familiar, I'd genuinely like to hear how it's showing up in your own institution, particularly as this year's new intake settles in. The shape of the problem is remarkably consistent across the sector, even if the priorities differ from one institution to the next. But I don't think it's something any institution needs to work through alone, and that's what partnership means to me working together to navigating shared solutions.

About the author: Louise Thorpe (CEO, Thesis SM)

Louise Thorpe is CEO of Thesis SM, a student information system built exclusively for higher education in the UK, Ireland and Canada. She has thirty years of experience working within UK universities and in global edtech companies.

To find out more about how Thesis SM supports Irish institutions: