Staggering helps a bit as it will mean some people who were asymptomatic become symptomatic before they go home, and they can't realistically police a quarantine of something like 60,000 - 80,000 students, of which something like 70% live off campus.

I'm not sure of the exact figures, I think Nottingham Uni has like 45k students and Nottingham Trent has about 25k.

The other thing is that the official "Nottingham City" boundary is actually quite small and has only 320k residents and I'd happily bet at least £50 that the official government figures don't include the students as residents which is why Nottingham has such a high "cases per 100,000" because the true population count is something like 25% higher than the the "official" one, artificially inflating the proportional cases count.