SEP Evaluation – recommendations update

10 Oct 2025

Making progress on the things that matter

Earlier this year, in March, we released the evaluation report for the Student Experience Programme (SEP) People and Structures.  For those not familiar with it, SEP was an initiative to create a revised operating model and ways of working, alongside new technology and processes, to improve the experience of our students and colleagues.

The evaluation report outlined 24 recommendations, carefully crafted from the valuable feedback and lived experiences of our colleagues. The recommendations are not just aspirational; they are practical steps intended to bring about genuine improvements in how we deliver projects.

In September, the University Executive (UE) convened to review our progress, reaffirming our commitment to make improvements in line with the recommendations.

One of the positive changes already underway is an improvement to our immigration advice services and in-person support. The Student Immigration Team have been and will continue to hold drop-in sessions three days per week for international students throughout the year, demonstrating our ongoing dedication to making tangible changes that benefit our community.  The sessions are based in the Main Library, offering a visible and easy-to-access service.

We are committed to learning from this experience and embedding these lessons into our future planning as a learning organisation. To support this, a guide to help us reach our ambitions is under development as a collaboration between the People Directorate and the Strategic Change Office, with input from Professional Services and Academic colleagues. It sets out clear commitments to how improvement work is done here at Manchester, giving our community confidence about what to expect when it happens. At the same time, it is designed to be practical and usable in day-to-day work. You will find limited reference to frameworks or methodologies:  it’s not a technical manual, but a guide that colleagues can adapt to your context to give consistency, support, and a good people experience through change.

Each of the recommendations has an action owner, and I am overseeing the delivery of these actions on a regular basis.

You can read the latest progress report here.

We still have lots more work to do on achieving the remaining recommendations, but I’m confident that we are heading in the right direction and that colleagues will start to see and feel a difference in how we deliver improvements.

I’ll provide further updates on progress when there’s more to share, including the practical guide on how we will continuously improve our University, and deliver the aims of our new Manchester 2035 Strategy when it's ready.

Best wishes,

Ele Morrissey