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Demand trends The summer recruitment round is volatile in 2023, and intake levels hard to predict. Even now, after exam results have been announced, many institutions do not have a completely clear view of the shape of their incoming cohort for the approaching academic year. This is perhaps the most…

In his book, The Living Company, Arie de Gues observes that most companies either go bust or are acquired within their first 50 years of existence and that it is a rarity for companies to survive for over a century let alone 200 or 300 years.1 He wanted to understand…

Proposition The first part of this blog set out the proposition for a national student record system to be selected, procured and deployed in every UK HEI resulting in substantial financial savings and major reductions in organisational pain. Following the example of Sweden’s national student record system, called Ladok, the…

Summary It is proposed that a national student record system be selected, procured and deployed in every higher education institution in the UK thereby delivering significant benefit to all institutions, students and staff and resulting in substantial financial savings and major reductions in organisational pain. The Case for a New…

The renowned mathematician and codebreaker, Peter Hilton, once said: “Adaptability to change is itself a hallmark of successful education.” Adaptability was central to Hilton’s efforts in deciphering German codes in 1942, and it’s just as important today. The pace of innovation and scale of disruption all around us is accelerating.…

  At a time when the UK is having to define and redefine its leadership and influence on the world stage, HEPI’s Soft-Power Index serves as a timely and challenging reminder that quality of leadership matters, and that it matters not just on a national scale, but globally. There are two questions to ask…

The twentieth anniversary of HEPI merits reflection on the positioning of the UK in the context of changes internationally in higher education. What is particularly striking to me is that throughout the twentieth century and earlier, the UK played a critical role in helping to shape the global and European…

Twelfth-century Northampton was one of the intellectual powerhouses of England. Fuelled by the wealth of the town and a long-standing tradition of teaching, it was by the 1180s well on its way to becoming the first serious university in the country.1 It was so attractive that scholars fleeing problems in…

Introduction The material in this chapter is drawn principally from a research project that I conducted with William Locke and Giulio Marini for the Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE) on the changing nature of the workforce in UK higher education between 2017 and 2020.1,2 In this research, we sought…

1. Congratulations. You’ve done it. Your schooling has been disrupted in unprecedented ways and you’ve been on the rough end of many disruptive shifts: most obviously, COVID and strikes but also a big crisis in teacher recruitment and retention. Yet you’ve come out the other end and are on the cusp…