A guest blog kindly contributed by Dr Anna Bull, senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Portsmouth and a founding member of The 1752 Group, a UK-based research and lobby organisation working to end staff-to-student sexual misconduct in higher education. The #MeToo movement has led students who experience sexual harassment at…
The UCL Institute of Education regularly hosts fascinating ‘What if …‘ debates about topical education issues, expertly chaired by Professor Becky Francis. I have just had the pleasure of taking part in one on access to higher education alongside Anna Vignoles, Paul Jump and Claire Fox. My speech is below,…
A guest blog kindly contributed by Dennis Sherwood, founder of Silver Bullet Machine. I’m an outsider. As neither an academic nor in HE administration, I have no right to interfere. But as an outsider, and one who has worked closely with many academic teams, perhaps I can act as an…
Tonight, a new book on the state of independent education will be officially launched by Routledge. With 57 short contributions, many of the authors will be well-known to HEPI’s readers for they include a Vice Chancellor, a peer, various academics, a former special adviser to a Conservative Secretary of State for Education, think tankers, an education journalist and a former Labour Secretary of State for Education. My own chapter in the book draws comparisons between independent schools and UK universities. It is reprinted below, with kind permission of Routledge. The post-war school system in England and Wales was established by the 1944 Education Act. Section 81 of the Act that enabled Local Education Authorities…
Last week, I was copied in to more tweets from other people than I have ever been before. It started when I was quoted in an article in The Times that was headlined ‘University grades: firsts for quarter of students with lowest A levels’ and which discussed the number of…
When I recently attended an event at the Resolution Foundation on the use of LEO data, someone said they thought we were the first country in the world to have this kind of linked data on graduate salaries available. My experience in Russia last month proved this not to be…
A guest blog kindly contributed by Dr Mike Baxter, Goal Atlas Ltd. In my recent analysis of the published strategies of 52 UK universities (University Strategy 2020), I discovered that almost 63% of university strategies have end dates in 2019, 2020 or 2021 and hence will need to be re-written…
I have a niece who is studying ethics as part of one of her GCSEs. Whenever I see her, she asks me to pose difficult ethical issues for us to debate. So we chew the fat over what moral code should be built in to the design of autonomous vehicles,…
This breakfast briefing launched HEPI’s report How much is too much? Cross subsidies from teaching to research in British universities Speakers at the roundtable included the LSE Director, Dame Minouche Shafik, HEPI report author Vicky Olive, and Nick Hillman, HEPI Director.
This roundtable featured guest speaker Lord David Willetts, Board Member of UKRI, former Universities Minister (2010-15) and author of A University Education. It provided a forum to discuss issues including: the evidence base (or not) for research-informed teaching; cross-subsidies from teaching to research (or vice versa); how the projected increases…