University, sector and civic leaders will attend short opening events taking place at Greenwich, Medway and Canterbury today, while the sculpture will tour the Group’s four campuses through the week. Staff from both the University of Kent and University of Greenwich will come together officially for the first Group-wide staff gathering on Friday 11 September.
Launching just ahead of the first academic term for the Group, the new LASE leadership team has promised that students will be placed front and centre in the new LASE-wide strategy that will be developed during the founding years.
From today, all 50,000 students can access all four campuses across the Group. Students needing student support services will be able to request them at the location of their choice, and can also use any of the libraries across the campuses.
Founding Vice-Chancellor and CEO of LASE, Professor Jane Harrington, said:
Since we first announced our intention exactly a year ago this week to formally explore a merger, we have been clear that students will continue to apply to, study at and graduate from their chosen university of Kent or Greenwich.
However, LASE will enable us to build on our collective strengths and create greater benefit for our 50,000 students across the group. From day one, they will have access to all our campuses, and over time we will be able to expand the services offered to them. We’ll also be able to work with our industry partners and organisations more strategically to look at more developed employment opportunities for students.
The official launch follows a year of intense work to develop the unique multi-university group model and secure approval of the model from the Department for Education and Office for Students. In readiness for the launch, all Kent and Greenwich staff became employees of LASE on 1 August – when the merger legally completed – whilst retaining their current terms and conditions and pensions.
Says Professor Harrington: “Many universities are grappling to balance the books right now. Domestic tuition fees were frozen between 2017 and 2025, during a period that saw significant inflation, the Covid-19 pandemic and a major cost of living crisis, creating substantial financial pressures across the sector. More recently, international student recruitment has also been affected by changes in government policy and wider geopolitical uncertainty. Kent and Greenwich have done the hard work to ensure we are independently in stable financial health, enabling us to enter a merger from a position of strength.”
“The staff at both Greenwich and Kent are amazing – they have really stepped up to deliver this merger and ensure that we now have an exciting, future-focused model that we hope will be a blueprint for others.
“As we get ready to begin our first academic year as LASE University Group, we wanted to mark the start. The sculpture is meant as a celebration of what we have achieved to get to this point, a coming together of our four diverse campuses, and a welcome to our 50,000 students, 7,000 staff and many more thousands of people across the region who will benefit from our super-university.”
Vivienne Stern, chief executive, Universities UK, said: "With sustained financial pressures across the university system in the UK, university leaders are finding creative ways to ensure they can grow and thrive in the future. The launch of LASE is a powerful example of that creative thinking put into practice, building on a platform of a 20-year partnership between Kent and Greenwich. It is a bold, trailblazing model that creates a stronger financial foundation, enabling both universities to continue building on their strengths and increase their impact and offer.
"University leaders are gripping the challenge they face, in all four nations of the UK. We’re seeing innovation, collaboration and a willingness to do things differently. We need governments in all four nations to work with us to make sure that our universities remain a source of national pride, and can deliver what students, employers and the wider public need of them in the future."
