The HEPI Blog aims to make brief, incisive contributions to the higher education policy landscape. It is circulated to our subscribers and published online. We welcome guest submissions, which should follow our Instructions for Blog Authors. Submissions should be sent to our Blog Editor, Josh Freeman, at [email protected].
The merits of area and individual-based indicators in widening participation work continue to be keenly debated, including on the HEPI website (for example, in this piece by Sasha Roseneil). In this blog, we illustrate that it is those living in the most deprived areas that are least likely to be…
It was a brief one-day visit for me this year to the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool, but I was there long enough to sense that there was a new mood afoot: the crazy Judean People’s Front leafleteers that used to congregate along the Brighton seafront were less numerous (albeit…
The report of the Industry and Regulators Committee of the House of Lords into the Office for Students, which was published on September 13th, hits the political sweet spot. The period of deep uncertainty and consequent political instability which has lasted since 2015 and then the Brexit referendum has given…
This autumn, the Arts Council England funded Big Bookshare project at the University of Wolverhampton will invite hundreds of prisoners to join a book club and take part in a series of activities including creative writing workshops. The project is based on close engagement with prisoners themselves, but also on…
There were only 22,060 degree apprentice starts in 2022/23 (of 560,000 students accepted through UCAS overall) – but if the 2023 Conservative Party Conference was your first foray into higher education, you wouldn’t know it. This was #CPC23, my first Tory Conference and a wonderfully hectic tour in search of…
If you ask any UK Vice Chancellor what’s keeping them awake at night, it’s highly likely to be the financial sustainability of their institution and the wider sector. Years of frozen funding coupled with rising costs are inevitably taking their toll across all four nations. University leaders are also increasingly…
Ongoing media headlines about ‘low quality’ or ‘rip-off’ university courses are just the latest in a series of headlines relating to quality and standards that go back over twenty years to talk of ‘Mickey Mouse’ degrees. The political expectation is often a regulatory intervention that can raise questions about the…
With skills given top billing in government initiatives from the Innovation Strategy to the Levelling Up White Paper, the question put to a recent HEPI roundtable dinner was an important one: how can we persuade policymakers to be more ambitious about research and scholarship in creating a highly skilled and…
Professionally, I have had the privilege to ‘grow up’ in a unique environment – a relatively small and specialist college offering Higher Education (HE), which five years ago gained University Title, having achieved Taught Degree Awarding Powers in 2017. Over the 25+ years, I have seen a few higher education…
University Alliance has long been something of a Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) superfan. For years it made no sense for our higher education system to have a REF to measure research quality but no TEF to assess excellence in teaching. The vast majority of students who experience higher education do…