Rethinking Student Services as Infrastructure: Insights from the University of Manchester

Craig Best, Director of Student and Academic Services at the University of Manchester, doesn't mince words about where student support has landed in the higher education landscape. At Symplicity's UK Advocate & Access User Group Meeting, he made the case that student services teams have moved well beyond their traditional pastoral role — and institutions that haven't caught up are leaving themselves exposed.

"We're no longer just helping students," Craig told the room. "We're shaping institutional risk."

The Visibility of Student Services

With 46,000 students across campus and four international centres, Manchester operates at a scale that makes the stakes of getting student services right very visible. Craig's remit — spanning outreach, admissions, and careers and employability — sits at the intersection of student experience and institutional performance metrics. As regulatory scrutiny intensifies, particularly through TEF data and the Office for Students, he's found himself increasingly pulled into conversations about risk mitigation, continuation rates, and attainment gaps that once sat firmly in academic territory.

His argument is that fragmented, siloed service delivery is itself a risk — and one that students bear the cost of.

"Fragmentation is the hidden tax that we charge our students," he said. "Students don't experience departments. They have a journey."

That conviction has driven a significant redesign at Manchester. The university moved from a single, hard-to-find central student services hub to twelve distributed hubs across campus — each with a consistent baseline service offer but adapted to feel embedded in its local school environment. The result was striking: 63% of initial queries resolved at first contact, response times cut from five working days down to two or three, and a 14% increase in engagement with support services.

Underpinning that shift is a deliberate move away from crisis management toward upstream intervention. Craig described the transition from reactive firefighting — recognisable to many institutions post-pandemic — to proactive outreach, early engagement with students showing signs of disengagement, and embedding financial guidance into induction from day one. The philosophy is straightforward: the cost of a crisis model scales; the cost of prevention doesn't.

Unified Technology is Essential

Technology has been central to making the model work. Manchester uses a small set of technology partners with large, connected ecosystems, deliberately avoiding the complexity of integrating dozens of disparate systems. "We're working with companies who have a large ecosystem, which means things plug in and work seamlessly," Craig explained. CRM and case management infrastructure allow the distributed hub model to maintain visibility and consistency across the university and gives the team the data it needs to demonstrate value to senior leadership.

That data piece has been one of the harder won lessons. Moving institutional stakeholders from anecdote to evidence — proving that student services teams are directly linked to retention and continuation, not just providing a nice-to-have — required patience, credibility, and a willingness to start small.

"We showed we could do things incrementally, then we did the larger things," Craig said.

The question he leaves institutions with is uncomfortable but necessary: if you were designing your student services from scratch today, would you design them the way they are? For Craig, incremental improvement can only go so far. The real opportunity is redesign — building student journeys, not service departments.