Let’s hear it for interns!

When Ivan Cameron died fifteen years ago, his father David Cameron said,

‘When we were first told the extent of Ivan’s disability, I thought that we would suffer having to care for him but at least he would benefit from our care. Now as I look back I see that it was all the other way round. It was only him that ever really suffered and it was us – Sam, me, Nancy and Elwen – who gained more than I ever believed possible from having and loving such a wonderfully special and beautiful boy.’

I think about those words a lot. They are a powerful reminder of what gives life meaning and how things don’t always work out the way around that one expects.

I hope it doesn’t sound trite when I say that the thought also encapsulates how education often works.

While it may sometimes seem on the surface as if education is the process of transmitting knowledge from an educator to the benefit of the person being educated, the gains often flow in the opposite direction.

It can be a pleasure and a privilege and a great learning experience to educate others. (It’s one reason why we should talk more about teaching-informed research and not just research-informed teaching.)

I’ve been thinking about all this because HEPI’s 2024 internship programme has just come to an end. When we first created it a decade ago, we thought the interns would be the main beneficiaries. We were selflessly providing a public service!

It seemed right that a research think tank / charity should seek to help bring on (in a small way) the next generation of people interested in education policy, even if it was going to mean extra bureaucracy and hassle for us. (In truth, the scheme started by accident when Nicholas Robinson emailed me from Australia nearly a decade ago offering to work with us for a few weeks in the summer of 2015, but we still thought we were mainly going to be giving rather than receiving.)

A decade on, I can see that I could not have been more wrong. Our interns have given HEPI much more than they have received. Indeed, some of HEPI’s very best reports have been produced by our interns, such as:

• Poppy Brown’s paper on student mental health
• Megan Bowler’s paper on the decline in language learning
• Charlotte Freitag’s paper on the student experience at Oxbridge
• Vicky Olive’s paper on cross-subsidies from international students to research
• Rohan Selva-Radov’s work on the average tenure of vice-chancellors

There are lots of reasons why these reports have been so good but one obvious one is that they’ve been written by people close to the coalface of higher education – ie by current or very recent students who have been experiencing the highs and lows that being a student typically entails.

Those past HEPI interns whose careers we’ve kept sight of have all, without exception, gone on to great success, generally in an area related in some way to their research for HEPI. I’m not claiming we steered them in the right direction – most of our interns have arrived with a clear idea of their own on what they would like to write about and were already incredibly motivated before they started working with us. But whatever the cause, they’ve gone on to have very successful and impressive careers, especially in education and the civil service. They include, to take one example, the current Head of Growth and Skills Policy at the South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority.

Sadly, our internship programme withered for obvious reasons during COVID and has never got fully back up to steam again since – until now that is. Josh Freeman, HEPI’s Policy Manager, who was himself HEPI’s postgraduate intern a couple of years ago, when he wrote about universities’ debating societies and ‘quiet no-platforming’, has been the driving force with support from Rose Stephenson, HEPI’s Director of Policy and Advocacy.

So look out in the next few weeks for HEPI output written by this year’s interns covering grade disparities and marketisation.

Of course, we are far from alone in think-tank land in running an internship programme. This was brought home to me when, at Josh’s suggestion, the excellent think-tank convening group known as Smart Thinking recently hosted an Interns Showcase where think-tank interns could explain their work to others. There was, for example, a brilliant presentation on the green belt by an intern from the Centre for Cities. HEPI’s own two 2024 interns showcased their work on the marketisation of higher education and awarding gaps –watch this space for more information from these projects soon.

So what is the purpose of this discursive blog? It’s threefold.

1. To remind those with the power to implement an internship programme that it can hugely benefit their organisation – not just the interns.
2. To flag the importance of paying interns. It’s unlikely most think tanks could afford to pay a full salary for the interns they host, but there’s a huge difference between paying nothing and paying something: making a meaningful contribution to interns’ actual living costs and covering expenses incurred seems like the minimum that should happen.
3. And to celebrate those who’ve worked with us over the years – thank you!