How managed services embraces innovation to transform higher education in the UK and Ireland – Part One

The education IT challenge: Structural constraints meeting rising demand

Higher education institutions across the UK and Ireland operate in one of the most demanding environments imaginable. They must simultaneously manage financial constraint, chronic IT skills shortages, ageing and fragmented technology estates, and an escalating cyber threat landscape — whilst facing mounting sustainability obligations and accelerating demand to embed AI into teaching.

For academic leaders, this creates a genuine dilemma: how to innovate in the classroom when the IT infrastructure doesn’t support the needs of  today, let alone tomorrow.

Student and staff frustration is not unfounded. Lecturers struggle to access the tools they need to teach effectively. Students encounter unreliable Wi-Fi and outdated systems that make learning harder, not easier. Research projects stall when data systems don’t integrate. Sustainable practices remain aspirational rather than operationalised because nobody has the bandwidth to measure them properly.

For many institutions, the question is no longer whether to consider managed services, but whether they can afford to delay.

The IT skills and infrastructure gap

The operational consequences of financial constraint are clear. Jisc, the not-for-profit digital services body for UK education, has found through its infrastructure reviews that most further education colleges carry a persistent IT skills shortage. IT teams are smaller than at any point in recent years, and when a long-standing technical specialist leaves, the knowledge gap can be operationally significant.

In higher education, Jisc’s 2024-25 Digital Experience Insights survey highlights the scale of the capability gap:

• Only 23% of higher education teaching staff reported that their institution provided access to AI platforms, despite 37% already incorporating AI tools into their teaching practice
• Availability of specialist training in AI and data analysis was reported at just 23% and 11% respectively
• Infrastructure reliability compounds the problem further, with Jisc’s 2023-24 professional services survey finding that 42% of higher education professional services staff experienced WiFi issues on campus, and 27% could not access the systems they needed either on or off campus

These are not marginal inconveniences. They represent a direct and measurable drag on institutional productivity and on the experience of the students these organisations serve.

Cybersecurity: A growing and disproportionate threat

The cybersecurity challenge facing higher and further education has moved beyond manageable risk into a category of persistent, structural exposure.

The UK Government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025, conducted between August and December 2024, found that 91% of higher education institutions and 85% of further education colleges identified a breach or attack in the previous 12 months, compared to 43% of UK businesses overall.

Stay tuned next week for the second instalment of this deep dive, where my colleague John will highlight the innovation imperative in the modern classroom, sustainability and what good managed services entails.