Every year, the Keystone Awards recognise both the students and institutions that have driven higher education forward, displaying unmatched leadership, resilience and innovation. This year was no different.
As the wider world continues to shift and change, the heroes of higher education are those who push the boundaries towards an interconnected future: from training that carried on through conflict, and hackathons confronting gender inequity, to scholarships widening access to education for displaced students.
Teaching through a war
In Kyiv, KROK Business School, our Training Provider of the Year, spent 2025 running leadership programmes for Ukrainian companies through missile attacks, security threats and blackouts that lasted for hours. They held fast to their convictions and kept doing what they do best – supporting their community – through some of the most challenging conditions imaginable.
"This award belongs to our entire community — our students, alumni, faculty, corporate partners, and staff… We are proud to represent Ukraine on the global educational stage."
Olha Karpova, Executive Director, KROK Business School
Turning hardship into a helping hand
Our Student of the Year, Shiza Hirani, is 20 and studies business at the University of Regina in Canada. A first-generation immigrant, she was told more than once she was "too young" for the rooms she wanted to be in, so she built her own.
Her nonprofit, Youth MentorNet Café, has reached over 150,000 young people across more than 15 countries. She has also founded a national support network for young people living with Crohn's and Colitis, now 5,000 strong. And she did it all as a volunteer, while caring for family through serious illness.
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That instinct of harnessing personal struggle to ease the troubles of others runs right through this year's other student winner, Priscilla Jeyaraj.
Our International Student of the Year, Priscilla is a first-generation Malaysian PhD student at Queen's University Belfast, researching rare diseases. Having felt the loneliness of being far from home, she opened her own front door, welcoming local and international students for Christmas and Chinese New Year. She founded a rare disease society and trained fellow students to step in when they witnessed discrimination. Through her efforts, Priscilla not only improved her community, but created one that embraced those who were displaced from their own.
The University of Bristol's Think Big Development Programme, our Outstanding Student Experience winner, brings the same energy in a larger scale.
While a scholarship covers your fees, it doesn't give you confidence or a network: this is where Think Big comes in, providing this for 750 international scholars. There’s evidence that their support matters: 49% of its undergraduates earn a First, against 15% across the wider international cohort. As Deputy Director International Maria de la Pisa put it, the win shows how support can "extend far beyond financial assistance" to change what a scholarship makes possible.
Pushing back against the status quo
Some of our winners simply saw something broken and fixed it.
At RMIT Vietnam, students noticed the gap between what the data said about gender inequality and what actually gets talked about. Hack The Gap, our Outstanding Equality, Diversity & Inclusion winner, gave them the tools to act, as nineteen student teams turned their own experiences into board games, short films and campaigns designed to foster conversation and build both awareness and connection.
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Meanwhile, at the University of Waterloo, the problem was smaller but familiar to anyone overwhelmed by choice. Their Find Your Path campaign, our Outstanding Education Marketing & Recruitment Campaign winner, swapped course listings for guided discovery, helping students find programmes that fit who they are and reaching 37 countries on a shoestring budget.
One for all
Sometimes, the most meaningful and long-lasting impact is quiet and personal. Andy Radford, Professor of Behavioural Ecology at the University of Bristol, has had a life-changing effect in the lives of his mentees. Our Outstanding Teaching & Mentorship winner has spent 19 years building research teams where people feel safe enough to talk about anything from imposter syndrome and family loss to burnout, with his mentees returning years after they've moved on from the team.
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Just as Andy looks to provide an environment where the mind can heal, some of our winners, like Liyan Ming, our Research Student of the Year at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, are putting their energies towards scientific progress for human wellbeing. In her research, Liyan uses machine learning to measure temperature inside the brain with light-emitting nanoparticles. She also learned Spanish to settle in and quietly helps new international students find their feet. The award, she says, "motivates me to continue pursuing research that can make a meaningful impact."
Meanwhile Conor Gammell, Student Athlete of the Year at University College Cork, is a first-class Biotechnology student who also plays Gaelic football at a serious level across college, club and county. Conor's commitment to both his studies and sports shows incredible discipline, and he seems to enjoy every bit of it. "Balancing competitive sport alongside my academic and professional commitments has been demanding," he said, "but incredibly rewarding."
Setting a new standard
Our Higher Education Institution of the Year, the Luxembourg School of Business, was founded in 2014 and is the country's only nationally accredited business school. In barely a decade, it has grown from 189 students to nearly 300, on its way to 364, without once loosening its standards: last year's Master in Management drew 226 applications for just 43 places.
But what really won over the judges was the discipline behind that growth: five focused programmes built around Luxembourg's real strengths in finance and international business, mandatory paid internships that lead to strong graduate outcomes, and a research profile now serious enough that its dean sits on a European Commission expert group.
The school will display its trophy in a restored château linked to Villeroy & Boch, "a fitting symbol," the school says, "of our ambition to connect tradition with future-ready education."
Ten winners, ten very different stories
Tied together by an ambition to make the higher education sector, and the world, a better place, this year's Keystone Awards saw something worth doing and did it, even when it was hard, and often for someone other than themselves.
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