Collaboration and contributions behind the new provision for prospective postgraduates
The Postgraduate Entry 2026 website that launched on 7 October introduced new approaches to how we present degree programmes. Contributions from colleagues in schools, colleges and support units have been critical to our transformation of online provision.
This launch marks the second phase of our project to redesign the University’s prospective student web presence, with our completely overhauled degree programme listings introducing a number of enhancements.
In addition to providing updated templates that better address the top priorities of prospective students, our new content structures are also much more flexible. This has resolved several historical challenges for the service I manage, and reduces the need for complicated workarounds to present the diversity of the University’s programme portfolio.
The new programme templates
The most obvious difference between our old and new provision is the new postgraduate taught and research templates. These present a more flexible layout that prioritises what we know to be the needs of students, while balancing opportunities to include value-added extras that address more nuanced priorities for different subject areas.
This being the first year using these new templates, there has been a lot of work for colleagues in schools and research groups to adapt and update their content. We’ve been really pleased to see the effort and time teams from across the University have put in to take advantage of the new opportunities.
We’ve also had very few requests for ‘missing’ headings or template areas, which suggests we’ve managed to hit the majority of bespoke requirements across our range of programmes.
This is particularly true for research programmes, which can benefit from the flexibility of the template to present both structured, project-based or MScR programmes and the more open structure of programmes accepting student-led PhD proposals.
The design process we went through to deliver the new templates has helped ensure that the new provision meets both student and business needs:
- User research with over 50 postgraduate applicants and current students to help us better understand their needs
- Content audits across a broad cross section of existing school and research group websites to identify the patterns in what was being published
- Co-design sessions with marketing and student recruitment colleagues to help us better understand their business needs and shape our approach together
- Prototyping and testing design approaches, improving based on what we learned, and sharing the findings back with our student recruitment and marketing community.
Collaborating with schools on the design of the taught programme page
Read more about the future state
How Schools are using the template
We’ve been impressed too by our colleagues’ use of rich multimedia content to present their programmes in the best possible light. For example, the Business School has pulled in imagery and quotes from their Masters of Change campaign to their alumni profiles, bringing an individual brand perspective to their degree finder entries.
A Business School programme page
ECA has also done a large piece of work to express the full cost of study by enhancing their information around mandatory and non-mandatory costs. Our research consistently indicates cost of study is a primary concern for prospective students, and ECA’s new content directly addresses this. While it outlines the extra costs that students face for project work and trips, it also reiterates the range of opportunities students have access to on programme.
Fees, costs and funding information for an ECA programme
The Law School has also greatly expanded their content on degree finder, as well as acting as a first live use case for our new messaging style for programmes that might open for applications later in the cycle.
How Colleges are using the template
The new system also supports our colleagues in College-level admissions teams, offering the opportunity to both standardise content or introduce bespoke requirements where applicable. We designed a group of reusable content elements in collaboration with the three Colleges, allowing them to quickly modify content across large groups of programmes.
For example, a large proportion of the College of Science and Engineering uses the same deadlines every year. In future, if changes are required to this boilerplate copy, updating it once will roll the change out across all programmes it applies to. While it was a big piece of work this year to set these up in the templates, it will certainly pay off in future cycles.
Applying section of a CSE programme using standardised content blocks
We are really grateful to colleagues across the Colleges for their work with us over the past few months to achieve solutions that better serve their needs as well as those of our students.
Data from Student Systems
The new system has also transformed our relationship to the ‘golden copy’ programme information that sits in Student Systems. On the old degree finder, we received three feeds (fees, apply links, and degree programme table (DPT) links) in one file. Therefore, if anything needed to be removed (apply links being the most common), we effectively ‘lost’ all the other data due to the way this data was being sent.
The new degree finder instead receives all this data through an API, receiving the information from the three feeds in a more independent way. This API was built as a pilot project between Aaron in our team and Student Systems Partnership, and has had a very positive effect on our relationship to the data.
This addresses the core frustration of the old system which meant that once apply links closed, the automatic feeds of fees and DPT links were also hidden. As we now receive these in a different way, this no longer happens; if an apply link is closed we can still receive the fees and DPT links.
It will also reduce the need for colleagues in Student Systems to manually ‘hide’ data from the degree finder, as we have increased flexibility on our side to handle edge cases (for example, programmes with staged admissions deadlines, or those delivered with external partners).
Future enhancements and next steps
We’ve already identified some areas where we can make incremental improvements to the system, such as the back-end editorial experience and how we handle programme closures and suspensions. We’ll also be turning our attention to the supporting guidance for the system to address the most common questions that came up during training and preparation for postgraduate 2026.
We’ll also be turning our attention to appraising the new templates with students. We did the same after the launch of the undergraduate 2026 degree finder to identify where to focus our efforts following the launch:
Appraising the new undergraduate study website: a scorecard approach
We’re also in the process of collecting feedback on the processes behind postgraduate 2026, and will draw on that when we start preparing for PG 2027 next year. If you’d like to share your feedback, please do get in touch. But for now, to all those that contributed to postgraduate 2026, thank you!
