As the cost of living crisis hardens into a “new normal”, the principal impact appears to be on time – and like staff, students are now expected to maximise efficiencies in ways that few understand clearly and in ways that leave little slack. In this session a panel of students will help us to understand the pressures, the weigh-ups and the calls they’re making to pack it all in – with lessons for everyone from module leaders to academic strategists, from employers decoding barebones CVs to those in charge of the UK’s student finance systems.

In different ways across the UK there have been efforts to make post-18 skills and education provision more coherent, more aligned, and more legible to the students and employers who benefit from it, from funding, to quality, to curricula. But while nobody objects to collaboration and partnership work in principle, the reality can be much messier and involve more compromise than some might see as desirable. Our panel will interrogate the principles of “tertiary” education provision and the practicalities of what is needed to make it work.

There’s a new government, with a new, mission-led policy agenda for higher education in Westminster centred on opportunity and economic growth. How can higher education navigate its way through funding challenges and regulatory reform while also working in partnership with the new government to deliver its national missions?