A version of this guest article was originally presented by Iain Mansfield at the HEPI Partner Policy Briefing Day. “I can call up 50 academics who will tell me how to design the perfect pension system, but I can’t find any who can tell me how to improve the one…
The results of this year’s school exams will be announced in a few weeks’ time. But as recently reported in the TES, Times and Telegraph, different examiners can legitimately give the same script different marks. As a consequence, of the more than 6 million grades to be awarded this August,…
Today’s guest blog, from Dr Greg Walker, CEO of MillionPlus, is a full and thoughtful critique of the Augar review, and we urge people to read it carefully. As someone with experience with independent reviews of higher education, I understand the energy and effort that panel members and officials put…
A guest blog kindly contributed by Paul Woodgates, at PA Consulting It’s hard to remember a time when universities faced so many unknowns. Will the Augar Report recommendations ever become reality? How much money will the sector have? What will Brexit mean? Will the economy nosedive? What kind of government…
This is a guest blog from Dr Richard Budd, from the Centre for Higher Education Research and Evaluation (CHERE) at Lancaster University. The National Student Survey (NSS) has supposedly tracked the quality of undergraduate provision across the UK since 2005. It is apposite that universities are encouraged to pay attention…
MillionPlus has been at the forefront of organisations calling for the Level 4 and 5 education space in England to be revived as an outcome of the Augar process and it is pleasing to see this agenda picked up in the report. These important qualifications, such as Foundation degrees or…
This a guest blog, by Sarah Stevens, Director of Policy at the Russell Group is kindly contributed as a response to a HEPI blog, by Hugo Dale-Harris “Will new online guidance on ‘facilitating subjects’ help or hinder fair access to highly-selective universities?” Recently, the Russell Group launched a new interactive website to host our Informed Choices guide explaining how subject…
This guest blog from Dean Machin, Strategic Policy Adviser at the University of Portsmouth responds to the debate around the publication of HEPI’s Policy note 13 on measuring wellbeing in higher education. He writes in a personal capacity. Universities are investing more resources in their students’ well-being. This is right.…
As we await the outcomes of Dame Shirley Pearce’s review of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), it is worth reflecting on what Sir Philip Augar’s Post 18 Review of Education and Funding tells us about the possible future of the TEF. In doing so, it is first worth considering four…
In a previous article on the HEPI blog we reported one of the results from our University Strategy 2020 research report: 63% of UK universities are due to renew their strategy over next year or the year after. This was based on an analysis of a sample of 52 university…