Implications for Strategy, Risk and Leadership in UK Universities
Transnational education (TNE) has become an increasingly important component of the UK’s international higher education activity, allowing institutions to deliver programmes to students overseas through partnerships, joint degrees and offshore provision. While research-intensive institutions have long participated in TNE, for many it has not traditionally been a central pillar of their international strategy. However, there are increasing indications that more research-intensive institutions are expanding their engagement with TNE, raising questions about how this aligns with the traditional research-intensive model and its priorities.
This shift reflects a combination of financial pressures within the UK funding model, greater uncertainty around international student recruitment, and intensifying global competition, alongside opportunities to maintain international reach and presence. This raises important questions not only about institutional strategy, but also about whether existing leadership structures and capabilities are aligned to support this shift.
Recent announcements – such as the University of Exeter’s plans to establish a teaching presence in Cairo, alongside a growing number of UK universities expanding their presence in India, including Southampton and York – illustrate how some institutions are evolving their approach to TNE. The question for the sector is whether this reflects a longer-term strategic repositioning or a more immediate response to current financial and recruitment pressures.
Choice of delivery model
Branch campuses, joint ventures, dual-degree programmes and partnership-based provision all offer different levels of institutional control and financial exposure. These models often involve a trade-off between institutional control and speed or scale of expansion, requiring careful alignment with institutional risk appetite and brand positioning. While some UK universities have developed extensive international delivery networks through large portfolios of overseas partners, others have focused on a smaller number of strategically significant collaborations, such as joint institutes or dual-degree partnerships that involve closer academic integration.
Different arrangements can enable varying levels of academic oversight, influencing the extent to which institutions can align programmes with their research strengths and manage reputational risk while building long-term partnerships in key regions. As institutional reputation is closely tied to perceptions of academic quality and research excellence, maintaining close oversight of teaching, assessment and partner governance is essential to ensuring equivalence with home-campus provision.
This highlights the importance of selecting delivery models that both enable growth and are consistent with institutional strengths and risk appetite. These choices also have implications for the type of leadership capability required, particularly in balancing academic oversight, partner governance and commercial considerations across different operating models.
Financial sustainability
Establishing offshore provision often involves significant upfront investment in partnership development, regulatory approvals, staffing and programme development. In addition, institutions must establish robust legal and regulatory frameworks, including securing local approvals, structuring partnership agreements and ensuring compliance with accreditation and employment requirements. In many cases, programmes delivered overseas are offered at different price points to reflect local market conditions, with fee levels often lower than those for UK-based provision.
Returns on investment may therefore take several years to materialise, particularly as student recruitment builds and local partnerships mature. Institutions must also consider the potential for changes in local regulation, political conditions in host countries, market demand and competitive dynamics, all of which can affect the long-term viability of offshore programmes. For research-intensive institutions in particular, this creates a tension between long-term international investment and the need to respond to more immediate financial pressures. For universities that have not traditionally operated at scale in this space, these financial timelines require careful strategic planning, particularly where institutions are balancing long-term international investment against short-term financial pressures.
Evolving international leadership roles
As a result, senior leaders responsible for international portfolios and campuses will find their roles increasingly involve engagement with foreign ministries, regulators, public authorities and local education partners, alongside their traditional responsibilities. This requires a broader skill set, including the ability to navigate complex regulatory environments, build trusted relationships with government stakeholders, and manage partnerships within different political and policy contexts.
This reflects a shift from primarily outward-facing recruitment and partnership roles towards positions that combine strategic, regulatory and operational responsibilities. In practice, this is leading to a convergence between academic leadership, international strategy and commercial capability, creating hybrid roles that are still relatively ill-defined across the sector.
While elements of TNE expertise exist across the sector, the combination of large-scale delivery experience and familiarity with research-intensive institutional contexts may be less common. Institutions may therefore need to consider whether to develop this expertise internally or draw on experience from parts of the sector where international delivery is more established. As a result, institutions are increasingly required to define roles that do not yet have clear sector benchmarks, making both role design and appointment more complex.
Implications for institutions
As institutions expand their engagement with TNE, there are a number of practical considerations emerging around organisational capability and leadership:
- Defining new leadership roles – Traditional PVC International or Director of Global Engagement roles may not fully reflect the breadth of responsibilities required, particularly where institutions are developing offshore delivery or navigating complex regulatory environments.
- Accessing the right experience – Experience of large-scale international delivery, regulatory navigation and partnership governance is often concentrated in a relatively small number of institutions globally, making it a constrained and competitive talent market.
- Balancing internal development and external hiring – Institutions will need to consider where to build capability internally versus where external expertise is required to accelerate delivery or de-risk investment.
- Understanding the global talent landscape – Effective decision-making in this space increasingly relies on robust market insight, including how peer institutions are structuring roles, where relevant expertise sits globally, and what motivates individuals to move.
These shifts are not only strategic but organisational, requiring institutions to reassess how leadership capability is structured, developed and accessed.
Conclusion
As more universities consider expanding their engagement with transnational education, the challenge is not simply identifying opportunities but ensuring that expansion is underpinned by a clear understanding of risk, capability and long-term strategic fit. The extent to which universities begin to embed TNE within their core strategy may ultimately shape not only their international footprint, but also the evolution of their institutional identity.
In this context, institutions are increasingly seeking more granular insight into how these roles are evolving globally, where relevant expertise sits, and how best to structure leadership capability to support delivery. This requires not only an understanding of the external market, but also the ability to translate this into effective role design, assessment and appointment processes.
Veredus works with universities globally to support the design and appointment of senior international and transnational education leadership roles, combining market insight with targeted search.
Author:
Reece D’Alanno, Senior Consultant, Education
Email: reece.dalanno@veredus.co.uk
Contributor:
Nataliya Starik-Bludova, Co-Head of Executive Search and Practice Lead, Education
Email: nataliya.starik-bludova@veredus.co.uk