Across the higher education sector, we see increasing numbers of staff being referred to counselling and occupational health services. This report attributes the deterioration to factors such as excessive workloads, insecure employment and punitive metrics-driven performance management policies and argues that universities need to become healthier environments in order for…
A new Occasional Paper from the Higher Education Policy Institute reveals a big increase in the number of university staff accessing counselling and occupational health services. Pressure Vessels: The epidemic of poor mental health among higher education staff , HEPI Occasional Paper 20, by Dr Liz Morrish includes new data…
A guest blog kindly contributed by Scott Caizley, who is a PhD researcher at Kings College London looking at the experiences of low-income state school pupils at elite UK music conservatoires. Access and participation amongst state schooled students in UK conservatoires throughout the past years have remained at an all-time…
Lucian J. Hudson writes in a personal capacity. He is interim Director of Public Affairs and Communications at Oxford University, and a past Director of Communications at The Open University and Foreign & Commonwealth Office. In Lampedusa’s novel, The Leopard, chronicling upheavals in Sicilian society, one of its characters offers…
One issue on which most academics agree is how not to judge the value of different university courses. But, unfortunately, no one can agree on the right way to do it. This matters because the lack of consensus cedes power to people who may care less about the health of our sector.…
This book review has been kindly contributed by Francis Green, Professor of Work and Education Economics at UCL Institute of Education, and co-author, with historian David Kynaston, of ‘Engines of Privilege. Britain’s Private School Problem’, (Bloomsbury 2019). Private school leaders and sector authorities are sometimes more informative and thought-provoking when…
It is mental health awareness week so – quite rightly – your newsfeeds will be full of articles about mental health. At HEPI we’ve written about these issues at length before. But that is not what this blog is about. As our own Rachel Hewitt pointed out in last week’s…
A guest blog from Patrick Mulrenan, the course leader for the BSc Community Development and Leadership at London Metropolitan University. One of the challenges of policy making is that issues are sometimes defined in stereotypes. This is particularly true of university education. Television programmes such as Fresh Meat have portrayed…
This guest blog responding to yesterday’s media stories about independent schools and university entry has been kindly contributed by Chris Ramsey, Headmaster of Whitgift School, and spokesperson on universities for the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC). Journalists’ headlines are fair game of course, and always have been, but sometimes you wince a bit more than usual, and reading…
A guest blog kindly contributed by Dennis Sherwood, founder of Silver Bullet Machine. When the history of the world is written in 1,000 years’ time, Friday 10th May 2019 will be identified as a landmark date. For it was an event that happened on that day that enabled that history to…