Modernising Web Entry Requirements - University of Glasgow

10 March 2026

Client

University of Glasgow – One of the UK’s leading Russell Group universities, with a large and complex portfolio of student admissions, HR, finance, and compliance systems spanning thousands of users and multiple departments.

The Challenge

Managing postgraduate entry requirements across a large, research-intensive university is a complex operational challenge. For postgraduate taught programmes – including degrees such as MA and MSc – entry requirements must be reviewed and confirmed annually to ensure accuracy for prospective applicants and admissions teams.

At the University of Glasgow, this process involved hundreds of programmes owned by academic departments across the institution. While academic staff retained oversight of their programme requirements, admissions teams were responsible for coordinating reviews, maintaining records, and ensuring information published to the university website remained accurate and consistent.

Historically, entry requirements were stored largely as long-form text, often managed through spreadsheets or informal documentation. While workable at small scale, this approach presented several operational challenges:

Entry requirements were difficult to standardise or compare across programmes
Annual academic review cycles required significant manual coordination
Requirements data could not easily be analysed or reported
Updates to programme webpages relied on manual communication between teams
International qualification equivalencies introduced large volumes of additional complexity

Without a structured process or centralised system, the annual review of entry requirements became a time-consuming exercise involving multiple stakeholders across admissions and academic departments.

The university required a solution that would bring structure, transparency, and scalability to this process while supporting collaboration between academic programme leads and admissions teams.

The Solution

To address this challenge, Behan Services designed and delivered a dedicated entry requirements management platform using Oracle APEX , built on the university’s existing Oracle Database architecture.

The system transformed how entry requirements were managed by introducing a structured, workflow-driven approach that replaced fragmented manual processes with a unified platform.

A key design principle was moving away from free-form text towards structured, atomic data components .

Historically, entry requirements for programmes were stored as a reduced set of key data fields and longer text-based entries. While readable, this format limited the ability to standardise requirements, analyse them across programmes, or publish them consistently.

The new system broke requirements into individual data elements, allowing each component – such as module requirements or necessary documentation – to be stored and managed independently.

This structured approach enabled:

consistent formatting across programmes
automated generation of standardised entry requirement outputs
improved reporting and analysis
easier updates and maintenance

As part of the initial rollout, admissions teams undertook a retrofit process to migrate existing requirement information into the new structured format, creating a centralised and reliable dataset for future academic years.

Scale and Adoption

The introduction of the entry requirements platform has significantly improved how postgraduate programme requirements are managed across the institution.

The system has delivered several key benefits:

Annual review cycles between academics and admissions are completed more efficiently
Structured data enables more accurate and consistent entry requirements
Manual spreadsheet processes have been fully eliminated
Programme webpages now receive reliable, automatically generated requirement information
Admissions teams can generate reports on requirement data that were previously unavailable
Academic engagement in the review process has improved due to the simplified workflow

By removing communication barriers and providing a structured digital process, the platform has reduced operational overhead while improving the quality and transparency of entry requirement information.

Impact

The platform now supports a large network of users across the university, including admissions teams and academic programme leads responsible for postgraduate taught degrees.

Key characteristics of the system include:

Hundreds of users across admissions and academic departments
More than 300 postgraduate programmes managed within the platform
Continuous automated web feeds supporting the university website
Real-time updates to entry requirement information when changes are made
Structured reporting capabilities across requirement datasets

By providing tailored interfaces for different user groups, the system ensures that each stakeholder can interact with the platform in a way that supports their role.

Strategic Value

This project demonstrates how targeted enterprise applications built using Oracle APEX can modernise complex institutional processes while supporting collaboration across large organisations.

For the University of Glasgow , the platform now acts as a central operational system supporting postgraduate admissions, ensuring that accurate and up-to-date entry requirements are consistently available to both internal teams and prospective students.

Delivered by Behan Services , the project forms part of a wider portfolio of enterprise systems that replace manual processes with scalable, governed digital platforms across the university.

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