HDMAcross the higher education sector, those with strategic responsibility for teaching, learning, and student experience are grappling with increasingly complex challenges. Policy reform, growing student diversity, financial constraint, and the evolving emphasis on lifelong learning all demand thoughtful, evidence-informed responses. Yet many of these issues are best tackled not in isolation, but through dialogue with peers facing similar questions in different institutional contexts.
It was for this reason that I founded The Spinnaker Group and we had our first meeting in 2017.
The Spinnaker Group brings together senior colleagues from institutions across the sector who lead on teaching, learning, and student experience. It was established to enable the sharing of good practice, foster bilateral connections and collaborations, and create a space where senior colleagues can explore complex issues openly and constructively, outside the constraints of mission groups or competitive positioning.
Now comprising 75 member institutions, the group has grown steadily and organically. It also maintains active links with sector organisations including Advance HE and the Quality Assurance Agency, helping to connect institutional practice with wider sector conversations.
Why the Group Matters
What distinguishes the Spinnaker Group is not scale or visibility, but purpose and culture.
Regular, theme-focused meetings enable members to share institutional research, policy responses, and practical approaches to some of the most pressing issues facing the sector. Past themes have included awarding gaps and student success, assessment and feedback, personal tutoring, academic integrity, student wellbeing, teaching and learning during Covid-19, and the Teaching Excellence Framework.
The format deliberately prioritises parity of voice and non-hierarchical exchange. Members describe the group as a space where ideas can be tested, challenges surfaced honestly, and solutions explored collaboratively. It is less about job titles, and more about shared responsibility for making a difference to students’ lived experience within and across institutions.
Over time, this has led to meaningful bilateral collaborations, the transfer of practice across institutions, and longer-term professional relationships that extend well beyond the meetings themselves.
Focus of the Next Meeting: Lifelong Learning
As the sector turns its attention to lifelong learning, flexible pathways, and more episodic models of study, the value of this kind of cross-institutional dialogue is particularly clear.
The next meeting of the Spinnaker Group will focus explicitly on lifelong learning, exploring what it means in practice for curriculum design, assessment, student experience, and institutional strategy. As with previous meetings, the emphasis will be on sharing evidence, interrogating assumptions, and learning from diverse institutional responses across the sector.
An Invitation
The Spinnaker Group exists to support colleagues who are shaping teaching, learning, and student experience at institutional level. If you hold a strategic role in this space and are interested in joining a collaborative, sector-wide network grounded in trust, shared inquiry, and practical impact, I would be very pleased to hear from you.
Further information about the group can be found at www.spinnaker-group.net, where contact details are also available.
Previous writing on the Spinnaker Group
