Hi,
1. Is your RFID tag passive or active type? Passive meaning no internal power source. Passive usually only works in very short range.
2. I've worked with 27Mhz solutions in the past. 1.5meters is achievable, 3meters is about the limit, BUT this needs antenna design expertise and impedance match fine tuning. Will be very difficult for amateurs. I suggest you find ready made solutions, trying to design your own antenna will probably kill you.
3. Depending on the RF solution you have, you may have to write everything yourself, i.e. the RF MAC layer. That by itself should be enough for undergraduate FYP project.
4. I think your partner job is too easy compared to yours.

You're saying for e.g. the RF reader module is design to work with 10cm range, and you wanna design your own antenna to make it 1meter?
I should think there's a practical limit to how much gain a passive antenna can get. There IS a formula for RF propagation distance. You SHOULD do the theoretical calculations first to determine how much antenna gain is needed.

13.56MHz is the standard passive CSC. Touch'nGo is utilising Mi-Fare1 standard, which is same freq. The standard read/write distance is 1-5cm only in read world application. 10cm is in lab/development testing only.

To increase your reading range to 1m, as stated earlier, you need special design of the tag antenna and placement. i.e. distance it from object it stick onto. Also the type and material it sticks on, and whether it can act to re-bound the freq signal.

2nd, the antenna of the tag has to be redesign/bigger, in order to be able to power it up from a distance.

3rd, is to have a more powerful reader, and to narrow down the width of the transmission angle. e.g. from wide 60 degrees maybe down to 20 degrees.

Note also, whether for commercial / prototype, you may need to comply with MCMC standards, I think is 2W if I'm not mistaken. Anything higher, go for type approval testing. Hence, this will limit option #3, the power of the reader.

Hence, frankly, to do 1m reading at 13.56MHz, complying with MCMC and with some 99% read rate and accuracy, I think it is quite impossible to achieve now. If you manage to hit 99.99%, you can market out your product (seriously).