Enhancement projects in 2026
This week our steering group ratified our plan for prospective student experience enhancements in 2026. We’ll be looking at: cost of study, clearing, international qualifications and enquiry channelling.
After the development and rollout of the new Study site and Degree Finder, these projects are the first round of ongoing enhancements we have scheduled. Working with prospective student-facing services, the projects will deliver measurable improvements to the prospective student experience and savings in staff time.
Context
In summer 2025, we surveyed the student recruitment, marketing and admissions community to prioritise the areas identified as still in need of improvement. This highlighted some areas that mattered most to the majority of colleagues.
As is typical in top task surveys, a small number of items are identified as disproportionately important.
At the PSW Steering Group meeting in September 2025, the following areas were prioritised for initial research and liaison to establish potential scope and timeframes for delivery of improvements:
- EUCLID communications
- International qualifications
- Enquiry management routing (including potential AI adoption)
- Cost of study content
- Clearing
- Offer holder community building
Read more about the staff survey and priotiritisation process – my blog from October 2025
Refining the priority list – our 2026 projects
Since late October, the Team has been liaising with service managers, interrogating analytics and past user research, and conducting workshops with school and college-based customers of these services.
This has led us to a position to more confidently outline a scope and propose an initial timeline based on availability of services for collaboration and capacity within the PSW Team.
The projects proceeding in 2026 are:
- Cost of study content: Making it easier for prospective students to understand the likely cost of studying and living in Edinburgh, and ensuring the University better meets the requirements of the 2024 DMCC Act.
- Clearing: Undertaking user research and analysis to better understand the Clearing experience for prospective students and staff, to inform future enhancements in collaboration with SRA Admissions.
- International qualifications: Integrating web content about international qualifications into degree profiles to simplify the prospective student experience and reduce the website management overhead of the SRA International Recruitment Team.
- Enquiry management routing (including potential AI adoption): Enhancing the experience of prospective students from website visit to engagement with the SRA Enquiry Management Service, integrating AI into the process to facilitate greater levels of self service and providing more insight on enquiry behaviours and trends.
Improvements to EUCLID automated emails has proven infeasible due to current capacity constraints within Student Systems Operations.
A focus on offer holder community building has been deprioritised as liaison with SRA and schools identified that the preferred route did not require the skills available within the PSW Team.
Timeframes
All of these projects will begin with a discovery period, where we learn as much as we can about the prospective student experience, the staff experience, the technologies, policy, legislation and strategy related to the area. At the end of a discovery period, we may adjust our timeframes, priorities and scope based on what we’ve learned.
So these timeframes are our current forecast based on what we know about: the availability of staff we know we need to collaborate with, critical points in the annual student recruitment cycle and the size and complexity of the problems we anticipate fixing. They almost certainly will change.
(To be honest, I’d be more concerned if things didn’t change as this would suggest to me that either we’re very smart/lucky or we hadn’t been rigorous enough in our discovery work).
Likely durations of the projects we’ll run in 2026. The small yellow-to-orange bars under each project show the phases: discovery, design, development/delivery. The coloured squares indicate the skills anticipated to be needed in each phase: UX, analytics, content design and development.
Clearing: Will run from February up to the delivery of the annual Clearing provision. The main focus is on understanding the clearing experience for students and for staff, through user research and analytics. User research with students will happen once they’ve completed their clearing admissions process and have matriculated. We are also currently discussing the feasibility more immediate enhancements in 2026 with the Admissions Service based on learnings in 2025 that could be delivered ahead of the Clearing website launch in June.
Cost of study: Will run from February until April, and focus on improving students’ ability to estimate the likely total cost of studying and living in Edinburgh. This will support our adherence to the requirements of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 and address issues we saw in last year’s appraisal of our new undergraduate and postgraduate provision.
International qualifications: Will run from May until the autumn. The project will integrate international qualifications content into individual degree profiles and close down the current websites hosting this information. We anticipate delivering this work across a series of phases, so delivery may continue through the autumn beyond the scheduled project timeframe.
Enquiry channelling: Will run from September through to the end of 2026, although initial exploratory work around AI is already happening in collaboration with the Enquiry Management Team. We will redesign the flow from use of the website through to the resolution of a prospective student enquiry to increase levels of student self-service, improve the insight we get from the enquiry making process and enhance the experience for staff handling enquiries.
Potential additional areas of work
We are currently in discussion with the Centre for Open Learning, and hope to collaborate on a mini-project to integrate the content they manage around the International Foundation Programme into the Study website. Currently, we’re not as comprehensive as we could be in promoting these opportunities to international students, and with content spread across multiple websites, it’s not as easy for them to find or interact with as we would like.
The Careers Service have been supporting us recently to improve the visibility of their services to schools. Our research last year highlighted that students are looking for more information about what graduates go on to do after their degree and we would like to improve the graduate destinations content and data available in each degree profile. We will continue to establish if both our teams have capacity to do more in this area this year.
Questions?
Get in touch with me if you would like to know more about these projects, if you feel you have things to contribute or if you’d like to know more about our steering group and prioritisation process.
Neil Allison’s staff profile and contact details
Further reading – our appraisals of undergraduate and postgraduate provision 2025
Appraising the new undergraduate study website: a scorecard approach (July 2025)
Appraising the new postgraduate study website: a scorecard approach (December 2025)
