Why Independent Student Advice Could be the Most Important Gap Your Institution Isn't Filling

Alkhemy’s Independent Student Advice Hub

By Ollie Kasper-Hope, CEO and Co-Founder, Alkhemy

My wife Amy and I did not set out to build a consultancy. We set out to fix something that was bothering us.

Between us, we have spent our careers in and around higher education, working within institutions, alongside them, and in the student movement. We’ve seen a lot of the frustrations and challenges, that despite good intentions, still factor into the student experience.

So, five years ago, we started to build Alkhemy. We’re a small, values-led organisation that works with institutions and students' unions to enhance student support and engagement. We want to reshape and innovate from within the sector, carefully and with care for the people doing the work.

The need for independent advice and the problems with providing it

When a student receives a letter or email telling them they are under investigation for academic misconduct, or that they are being referred to a fitness to practise panel, they face one of the most stressful and consequential moments of their studies. What happens next matters enormously. Not just for the outcome, but for whether they can trust the process enough to engage with it at all.

In that moment, a student needs two things. They need someone who understands the regulations, the procedures, what the likely options are with the skills to talk them through those options. And they need someone who is obviously on their side, with no conflict of interest, no employment relationship with the institution, and no reason to soften an honest assessment. When a student is in “conflict” with their institution, the most accessible way to guide, support and advise them is through an independent, impartial body – not through another team or person employed by the institution.

Our case work reflects this. At a small and specialist students' union where we held an eighteen-month contract to deliver independent advice, the casework data across nine months of operation tells a consistent story. Seventy-eight percent of our cases were academic in nature: appeals, misconduct allegations, complaints, fitness to practise. In case after case, what made the difference was not just the quality of the advice but the fact that it came from someone with no connection to the institution handling the case. In one particularly striking example, a student facing a fitness to practise panel over allegations that could have ended their teaching career walked away with the case dismissed in full. They wrote afterwards: "I honestly am so grateful, I would not have been able to cope and prepare without your guidance and reassurance." Here we spotted something that that institution had missed, and they were grateful for it.

At Arden University's Students' Association, where we’ve been running an academic advice service for them since April 2025, the picture is consistent. Over 170 unique students supported in the first seven months alone. Eighty percent of cases resolved in a single session. And perhaps most telling of all: the majority of students who made contact had never used any support service before. Not because the need was not there. Because there was somewhere independent to go. 

The second part is the hard one. Because in most institutions, particularly smaller ones, specialist providers, and colleges delivering higher education, the people best placed to help are also the people embedded in the institution handling the case. Internal student services teams are skilled and they care. But they are not independent. They cannot be. And independence is not a technical nicety. It is the thing that allows a student to speak freely, to hear the truth about their situation, and to make an informed decision about what to do next.

The Office of the Independent Adjudicator received 4,234 complaints in 2025. A 17% rise on the previous year, the tenth consecutive annual increase, and the first time the number has exceeded 4,000. Financial remedies totalled just under £1.84 million. One in five students achieved a favourable outcome. Behind those figures is a much larger and much less visible group of students who did not understand their options, who accepted decisions they could have challenged, or who walked away from something that could have been resolved in their favour. That’s the intervention we can make for institutions and for students.

For smaller providers and specialist institutions, building a genuinely independent advice function from scratch is hard. It requires dedicated staffing, specialist expertise, and the resilience that a single-person service simply cannot provide. 

What about Students’ Unions?

Many institutions look to their students' union to fill this gap, and understandably so. Students' unions exist to represent and support their members, and the best of them do it brilliantly. But the reality of how advice provision works in smaller SUs deserves an honest look, because the approaches that tend to exist carry real risks that rarely surface until something goes wrong.

Some smaller SUs employ a single adviser. On paper this looks like a solution. In practice it is a single point of failure. Student advice is not an entry-level role. It requires deep knowledge of regulatory frameworks, the confidence to challenge institutional decisions, the emotional resilience to handle complex and distressing cases, and the experience to know when a case has merit and when it does not. When that one person goes on leave, burns out, or resigns, the service often goes with them.

Others share responsibility for casework across several staff members as part of broader roles. A Democracy Coordinator might pick up a misconduct case alongside their officer development work. A Communities Manager might handle an appeal between projects. The skills required for effective casework, empathy, patience, communication, detailed regulatory knowledge, are genuinely different from those that make someone excellent at democratic engagement or project management. Advice delivered by someone whose primary function is elsewhere is rarely advice delivered well, and the governance and insurance implications of that arrangement are rarely examined as closely as they should be.

In some institutions, elected officers carry the casework. Although rare these days; this is the highest-risk model of all. Officers are representatives, not trained advisers. They turn over annually. They are being asked to navigate complex, high-stakes regulatory processes on behalf of students whose academic futures may depend on the outcome.

None of this reflects badly on the people involved. It reflects the structural reality of under-resourced provision trying to meet a genuine need with whatever is available. For university managers who are funding or endorsing these arrangements, it is worth asking what the position would be if something went wrong.

What we have built

The Independent Student Advice Hub (ISAH) is Alkhemy's answer to this.

ISAH is a subscription shared-service model that gives HE providers and students' unions access to genuinely independent academic advice without needing to build or staff the infrastructure themselves. A pool of experienced associates, all seasoned student advice practitioners, delivers casework covering academic appeals, misconduct, extenuating circumstances, fitness to study, fitness to practise and complaints. We also offer support and guidance for student on Money as well as Accommodation, Students access the service through the institution's own branded channels: a line on a results letter, a link on a website, an email address that goes to a real person.

We began working with Arden University's Students' Association in 2024, designing and developing a bespoke independent academic advice service that launched in April 2025. That work gave us the proof of concept for what we have since built into the Independent Student Advice Hub, and Arden became our first ISAH partner when the Hub launched in April 2026.

Sophie Harrison, Director of the Students’ Association and Government Relations at Arden University, describes what it has meant:

"Developing an independent offer for our students at Arden so they can feel empowered and enabled to navigate the academic policy space has been a critical cornerstone of our Students’ Association strategic plan. We are already seeing students asking difficult questions and feeling confident with the answers & level of support they are receiving from the Alkhemy advisor team working directly on the Arden project. Seeing the impact on how this is changing their confidence, experience, and ability to make the best choices for them whilst studying at Arden, has been extremely positive."

This service is not built around a single adviser who can burn out, resign, or go on leave. It also works because the reporting it generates gives institutions honest intelligence about what their students are experiencing. And it works because students who have access to independent advice earlier in a process are less likely to reach the OIA at all.

As an ISAH partner, you receive:

• An independent academic advice service covering appeals, misconduct, extenuating circumstances, fitness to study, fitness to practise and complaints 

• Panel and hearing support, attending formal processes with students where permitted 

• A dedicated Advice Lead who embeds the service into your context and liaises with your teams 

• Agile associate capacity that scales up at peak periods without you carrying the overhead year-round 

• Regular thematic reporting giving your institution honest intelligence on what students are experiencing .

• A fully branded student-facing remote service delivered through your existing communication channels running Monday – Friday.

• Options for the service to be expanded to Student Money Guidance as well as Accommodation and Housing

If it sounds like something your institution needs, we would be glad to talk.

Click on the link below to find out more about the service and the team behind it:

www.alkhemy.org.uk/independent-student-advice | hey@alkhemy.org.uk