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Universities UK¡¯s Transformation and Efficiency Taskforce ¨C commonly known as the Carrington Review ¨C is right to focus squarely on the importance of increasing collaboration between universities.

¡°Collaboration¡± features almost 150 times across the 60 pages of , published on 2 June, and the cost of failure to meet this challenge is clear in the new data presented on the proportion of institutions already cutting back courses (49 per cent), research activity (19 per cent) and infrastructure investment (60 per cent).

As a federation of 18 universities, the University of London has been building what the Carrington Review calls ¡°collaborative structures¡± for almost 200 years. But while collaboration has always been part of our DNA, it is something we¡¯ve been able to scale up significantly in recent years, creating new forums, structures and modes of working together to reflect the context we face. And this, we believe, offers important lessons for policymakers and other universities.

First, collaborative efforts must begin with constructive dialogue. Second, they need to be based on shared objectives and an understanding of mutual capabilities and strengths. And, third, there are many forms of collaboration which do not take the form of full ¡°shared services¡±, important as those can be.

Even across our formal federation, collaboration takes multiple forms ¨C and this is a strength, not a weakness. Different frameworks for different kinds of collaboration can move nimbly, at varying speeds and involving different participants, to match the pressures of different activities and missions, from teaching to estate management.

Libraries are one university staple that is ripe for greater collaboration. Many people know the University of London primarily through our iconic Senate House, where our library is based. With 187,000 annual visits, this serves students and researchers across our member institutions and beyond by permitting the joint acquisition of digital resources, bringing together rare materials and pooling investment in digital infrastructure and systems. Crucially, we¡¯ve structured these arrangements flexibly, to ensure they are future-proof.

This emphasis on flexibility and practical benefits also applies to the University of London Worldwide, our distinctive model for TNE. This partnership between 12 federation member institutions harnesses their various strengths in developing course content, enabling us to offer more than 100 programmes, which are studied by tens of thousands of people globally each year.

Our federation members also came together through our School of Advanced Study last year to offer an intercollegiate modern languages programme, as cited in the task force report. This ensures sustainable student numbers while preserving important academic disciplines that would otherwise face uncertain futures.

Collaboration also underpins the momentum we¡¯ve achieved in lifelong learning. Here, our vision is to meaningfully expand access by allowing students to ¡°stack¡± whatever modules they choose to study into recognised qualifications. Access to lifelong learning is a personal passion of mine, and I¡¯m pleased that the UK government is supporting it with the forthcoming (LLE).

The Carrington Review also details opportunities to use shared buying power. The Bloomsbury Heat and Power network is a good example, bringing together three neighbouring federation members in central London ¨C UCL, SOAS and the University of London ¨C to generate and distribute power centrally through a Combined Heat and Power (CHP) scheme. Work is now under way on a major upgrade following recent investment that will decarbonise our Bloomsbury estate by 99 per cent. Other universities that are physically close to one another could imitate this example.

But for other institutions without our unique history, professional services could be the best place to start the conversation on deeper joint working. We have recently established a Collaboration Hub, following detailed discussions across the federation¡¯s smaller and mid-size members. In areas such as IT, health and safety and research services and even apprenticeships, joint working delivers real commercial value without compromising institutional identity.

Across all this activity, it has been critically important to acknowledge that aligning all member institutions across all their priorities is neither practical nor necessary. Effective collaboration starts with a ¡°coalition of the willing¡±, which can sit across bilateral as well as multilateral relationships.

Importantly, we needed to invest enough time for discussions so we could capture what was of interest to each organisation, instead of assuming that our interests were already aligned just because we all faced similar challenges. The lesson for other universities is that the right coalition in one area is not necessarily the right coalition in another: alliances should be neither exclusive nor all-encompassing.

But that does not make them any less crucial and, over the coming months, the University of London will be engaging with universities across the country to share what we¡¯ve learned about making collaboration work in practice. This includes a series of online case studies detailing our collaborative initiatives, designed to offer concrete examples for institutions exploring their own partnership opportunities.

As the task force report makes clear, the future financial health of the sector demands new thinking and radical approaches, rather than directly replicating existing models of collaboration. Our experience shows that a lot is indeed possible when institutions think differently.

is deputy vice-chancellor of the University of London.