Explore key insights from the AHEP and HEPI conferences on LLE, AI's role in education, and the evolving student experience within UK Higher Education.
Reflections from this year's AHEP and HEPI annual conferences, on lifelong learning, the student experience, AI, and the value of education and good governance, and why these gatherings remain such valuable opportunities to engage with the sector.
I recently attended two significant events in the Higher Education calendar: the AHEP (Association of Higher Education Professionals) annual conference, themed “Thriving together: reimagining professional services in a shifting Higher Education sector”, and the HEPI (Higher Education Policy Institute) annual conference, titled “Student life in an age of populism, technological change and geopolitical tension”. The two come at the sector from different angles: AHEP speaks to the professional services teams who keep institutions running, while HEPI convenes policymakers and sector leaders alongside representatives of the student body. The discussions resonated well beyond those working in policy or governance, speaking to anyone with an investment in the student experience and the future of UK Higher Education, and together they offered a clear picture of where the sector's attention is currently focused.
It's also impossible to ignore the wider political backdrop. HEPI looked at student life through the bigger forces now shaping the sector: a more polarised, populist politics, technology advancing at speed, and an increasingly tense geopolitical picture, and the day opened with a frank discussion of what a more populist politics might mean for universities. The more reassuring takeaway was that institutions are not a main target of public frustration, and that universities are well placed to be a confident, positive force in society, as long as they keep demonstrating their adaptability through change. Freedom of Speech was another running theme, and unsurprisingly so. Both Baroness Smith of Malvern, Minister for Skills and Josh Fleming, the Interim Chief Executive for the Office for Students (OfS) emphasised the current attention on freedom of speech. The viewpoint that particularly stayed with me on this issue came from Alex Stanley, Vice President, National Union of Students (NUS), who argued that, amid all the current focus on free speech, universities and sector bodies must not lose sight of their parallel duty to protect students from harassment and hate speech.
Set against that backdrop, a few key themes stood out for me across both conferences, and they are the ones I want to focus on here: the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE), the gap between the student experience and how it is portrayed, the place of AI in universities, and the enduring value of education alongside the case for good governance.
One policy came up consistently at both conferences: the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE). At HEPI, the Minister for Skills, Baroness Smith, framed it in her opening keynote as a way for people to shift and refresh their skills in response to a changing labour market, set against the backdrop of a UK skills shortage and around a million people currently not in education. It sat alongside other signals of investment in the sector, including the UK rejoining Erasmus in 2027 and the reintroduction of maintenance grants for degrees linked to priority sectors.
There is a structural ambition here too; several speakers returned to the idea of tertiary education, bringing further and higher education closer together rather than treating them as separate systems. Josh Fleming, the interim Chief Executive for the Office for Students, argued that the schism between further and higher education is a failure in how we currently approach education, when fundamentally they share the same aims, and that we would be far better served by having a more unified approach.
AHEP approached the LLE conversation in terms of operational reality, particularly in the session ‘How Ready are you for the LLE’, led by AHEP consultants. For professional services teams, the LLE is not an abstraction but a set of practical questions. Modular, flexible study affects admissions, fees and funding, timetabling and the whole student journey. A recurring point was that many institutional systems were simply not designed for this way of working, and that the changes will affect everyone, including institutions that do not plan to offer modular provision. Something as seemingly minor as whether an institution can scale up its process for accrediting prior learning could make a real difference to how well the LLE works in practice.
HEPI also launched the findings of the 2026 Student Academic Experience Survey, which paint a rather different picture from the one we tend to see in the media. Highlights of the HEPI presentation of the survey included:
As Alex Stanley, Vice President, National Union of Students, highlighted, the public conversation often runs the other way, so these survey results are notable. The media tends to report that students no longer see university as good value for their money, yet that is not what the survey shows. There is an opportunity here for the sector can use them to show just how much pressure students are actually under, to counter balance the popular narrative that a degree isn't worth it.
The pressures on students are significant, and independent study time is being squeezed as more students take on paid work alongside their studies. Alex Stanley described the university as a microcosm of wider society, noting that 14% of students are using food banks and that some are working more than 30 hours a week, a situation that has quietly become normalised, rather than treated as a crisis for our students. The student experience panel also picked up on a point that reinforces the principles behind the LLE: mobility between and within institutions already exists, with students changing courses and institutions under the current structure, and those who have been in care, have caring responsibilities or have experienced harassment being more likely to move.
Unsurprisingly, AI was a recurrent theme at both events. At HEPI, Professor Rakesh Patel, Professor of Medical Education, St Mary’s University London, positioned AI as the fourth major technological shift, after the PC, the internet and the smartphone, and argued that it gives universities a reason to pause and think about how they operate. Some things, he suggested, AI cannot do: the context, emotion, nuance and lived experience that sit at the heart of teaching and learning. The value of AI in universities therefore lies in supporting the human interaction that is central to them, rather than replacing it. Anila DeHart, Advisor & Researcher, Education–Workforce Coordination, raised the question of fairness, warning that those who can afford the best tools stand to gain the most, and that being able to reskill quickly is becoming more and more valuable.
AHEP took the conversation into day-to-day practice. The strongest theme was the case for critical, mindful adoption: knowing when AI use within institutional systems becomes too much, and weighing the value AI offers against the loss of the human element that students value. Delegates were wary of adding AI to everything without thinking through the impact, the potential disengagement and the risk of trusting AI outputs without reviewing or analysing them. The environmental cost of AI also surfaced, with honest questions about how that sits alongside institutions' sustainability commitments.
The value of education itself ran as a thread through both events. In her opening keynote at HEPI, Baroness Smith made the case that, against a culture increasingly willing to cast doubt on the worth of a degree, graduates go on to contribute to society as productive citizens and that widening participation in higher learning is central to how the country responds to change. Christina Lamb OBE, Chief Foreign Correspondent at the Sunday Times, drew on 40 years of reporting the world's conflicts to highlight a message that resonated powerfully in a room of educators: the one thing that makes more difference than anything else is education, particularly for girls. She referenced I Am Malala, the biography she wrote with Malala Yousafzai, and reminded the room that, even as we sat there, girls in Afghanistan are being denied an education. This was a sobering counterpoint to the domestic debate seen in the media about whether a degree is worth it: a reminder that, in much of the world, the right to be educated at all cannot be taken for granted.
Governance and financial resilience surfaced as another theme. At AHEP Professor Pamela Gillies, who wrote the Gillies Report examining what went wrong at the University of Dundee ahead of its Scottish Government bailout, drew out the real lessons from a story that has been talked about right across the sector this year: why good governance matters so much, why boards and staff need to engage and delve into reports and analysis, and how professional services teams can help build institutions that are better able to cope with whatever comes next. With finances stretched right across the sector, it is important not to view the Dundee story as an isolated case, and rather as a warning of what can happen when governance and financial resilience are not given the attention they need.
One thing I valued about both conferences was how openly people talked about the difficulties currently facing Higher Education in the UK. There was no shying away from the fact that funding is tight, that a lot of students are struggling, and that the sector is changing faster than many institutions are set up to handle; and yet the mood was far from despairing, with a real willingness to get on and tackle these things rather than just worry about them. It also reinforced for me how closely these issues are connected, with topics highlighted here all part of the bigger picture of higher education.
As Director of Solutions Consulting at Thesis SM, a key aspect of my role is helping institutions approach and navigate change, and I came away from both conferences more confident than ever that the systems, the policy and the people all need to move forward together if universities are going to succeed in today's higher education climate.
That interconnection is exactly where our work at Thesis SM sits, and it is what our cloud-native, configurable SIS architecture is built for. Any AI we introduce into the SIS has to earn its place, with a clear purpose and a demonstrable benefit for users, staff and students alike, and without losing the explicability or the human engagement that matters most in higher education. Our configurable curriculum structures are built for the ‘new normal’ the sector keeps highlighting, supporting modular study and flexible intakes alongside traditional routes, and the wider move towards bridging the gap between higher and further education. For students, Thesis SM means self-service access to their own data through the student portal; for the staff who support them, an intuitive, modern SIS that takes friction out of the day rather than adding to it. For those charged with governance, it means clear, accessible and easily reportable data to engage with. Running through all of it, and through our partnerships with institutions such as Manchester Metropolitan University and the Royal College of Music, is the same principle that ran through both conferences: the continued importance and value of higher education.
I joined Thesis in 2018 after a decade working in UK Higher Education institutions, specialising in Admissions and Student Management. As Implementation Manager, I oversee our UK Implementation Team, ensuring a smooth, efficient rollout of our solutions while optimising our implementation methodology for success.
What makes Thesis SM special is our people. Everyone is deeply passionate about Higher Education and dedicated to delivering the best solutions for the sector Collaboration and teamwork are at the heart of everything we do, creating an environment where we support each other and continuously innovate.
I’m most proud of how Thesis SM empowers end users in their daily tasks. With its user-friendly interface, clear and comprehensive applicant and student data, and powerful no-code workflow and reporting functionality, it streamlines processes and enhances efficiency. Having worked in UK Higher Education, I understand the importance of a strong SIS in supporting users effectively, and I’m excited to see institutions benefit from using Thesis SM.
Stay ahead of regulatory changes in higher education with Thesis SM's comprehensive, sector-aligned compliance solutions and expert support.
UK Higher Education Provider of the Year Does More with Thesis Student Management
Discover how Thesis Student Management's practical tools empower higher education institutions with greater control, flexibility, and efficiency.