Every year, HEPI starts our annual programme of events with three parliamentary breakfast seminars, co-hosted with our Partner organisation Advance HE and kindly sponsored for many years by the long-standing Labour MP Barry Sheerman. This year’s series kicks off next week, on Thursday 30 January, when we will consider ‘The geo-politics…
John Claughton, former Chief Master of King Edward’s School, Birmingham offers some reflections on Megan Bowler’s recent report on the crisis in modern languages. Nestor, the king of sandy Pylos, is the grand old man of The Iliad. He has seen the passing of two generations of mankind and is…
This guest blog has been kindly contributed by John Plowright, a former History teacher in an independent school and the author of various History textbooks, who has advised hundreds of pupils on their admission to higher education, including Oxbridge. Oxbridge, despite the best endeavours to widen access by the two…
This blog was kindly contributed by Dr John Butcher, Associate Director at The Open University . Emerging from the Christmas break into a new decade, I have been struck by the amount of looking back that has filled our media. Consequently, I too have been reflecting, this time on a…
Over the Christmas and new year period, there were more stories about building a UK ARPA, based on the US DARPA, which stands for Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency. Whether or not this is a good idea as a way of distributing research funding, and it may well be, has…
A little controversy At HEPI, we never set out to be controversial. But sometimes, inadvertently, we are. And never more so in the last year than with Iain Mansfield’s paper on grammar schools. When it came out, exactly a year ago on 10 January 2019, we were told the numbers…
This paper takes stock of the state of language learning in the UK, as the country teeters on the edge of Brexit and becomes used to being led by the first Prime Minister in over 50 years to have studied Languages at university. The author, Megan Bowler, a Classics student…
The Higher Education Policy Institute’s latest report, A Languages Crisis? (HEPI Report 123) by Megan Bowler, highlights a huge drop in demand for learning languages and makes a set of recommendations for reversing the fall. The paper shows only 32 per cent of 15-to-30 year olds from the UK can read and…
On Tuesday 17 December 2019, HEPI hosted a dinner looking at how universities will need to position themselves after the 2019 general election and Brexit, with opening remarks from Lucian Hudson (former Director of Communications at the University of Oxford), chaired by Nick Hillman, HEPI Director.
This HEPI roundtable dinner, hosted in partnership with Research England, provided a forum for senior leaders and policymakers from across the sector to discuss a range of key issues relating to future uncertainty in research funding including: What contingencies are universities and policymakers considering at this time? Can universities afford…