Higher Education

We advised a university on the options available to create a group including further education colleges and potentially other universities and/or private training providers.

We prepared a paper for the university’s governing body outlining the relevant constitutional and statutory provisions, including the implications under charity law, staffing and pensions issues, and regulatory requirements.

A key issue was how the proposed group would fit within the university’s existing group structure. We set out a number of options for the new structure, including how to accommodate the existing (separate) multi-academy trust arrangements of the university and one of its proposed college partners.

The university and the college are now undertaking due diligence.

We are advising our university client in connection with a series of whistleblowing allegations that suggested widespread breaches of its student sponsorship (formerly Tier 4) licence requirements, including allegations of mistreatment of students by recruitment agents.

The allegations were extremely serious and there was a need for urgent action. Over a matter of days, our team agreed an action plan with the university covering urgent steps to safeguard students, an investigation into the alleged sponsorship licence breaches, and reporting to the University Board and the OfS.

Our immigration team carried out an audit of the university’s sponsorship compliance and made clear recommendations on weaknesses and next step.

Our approach required careful consideration of existing sponsored students’ circumstances to identify if they were appropriately enrolled and continuing to engage, in addition to advice on how best to liaise with the Home Office team to prevent any disruption to legitimate students’ visa status during their course of study and any threat to the university’s licence.

We are advising a university client on how best to exploit the intellectual property of an early patent filed by a group of employees which relates to increasing the efficiency of diesel particulate filters in vehicles, and how this could be particularly relevant for use within developing countries.

The university has found an external investor for this project and we got to grips with the project very early on so that we could produce a useful heads of terms document in order to facilitate discussion.

We supported our university client to implement a student management system across its three campuses.

We supported the university during the procurement process to appoint a system integrator and software solution package, and to negotiate to ensure that the final form agreement provided the appropriate commercial and legal protections for the university whilst reflecting the specifics of the chosen solution.

During the negotiations we continued to work closely with the contract negotiation team to identify key risks in the process (in both the procurement process and in the negotiation of the terms of the contract) and provided formal advice to senior management, ensuring the key stakeholders were fully briefed and were providing appropriate input into agreement on commercial positions.

During the project, we worked in tandem with the university’s technical advisers, who designed the evaluation methodology, in order to provide regulatory input into the tender scoring and evaluation methodology. This allowed us to identify and reduce or mitigate procurement risk.