Looking back at HEPI’s most controversial reports – including an unexpected one from 2024

HEPI Director, Nick Hillman, starts 2025 by looking back at some HEPI controversies from the last decade.

New Year’s Day marked the first day of my twelfth year at HEPI. Over that time, I’ve had a hand in publishing (and writing) over 200 reports. None has stoked controversy for the sake of it, but neither have we shied away from publishing things that people feel need to be said even if they might be deemed by some to be controversial.

Fortunately, just four (that’s under 2%) of these pieces have flared into major rows. That’s about one report every three years or so on average, which doesn’t feel too bad a record for think-tank land. If we were in the business of stoking controversy for the sake of it, then it would be fair to say we are not very good at it.

Most people understand the role of think tanks is to make people think, whether they agree with them or not. Indeed, HEPI was founded as an offshoot of HEFCE in the early 2000s because it was felt there were things that should be said but which an official arms-length body could not easily say, with the overarching goal of speeding up the policymaking process

Some reports we were initially a little nervous about putting out have been accepted at face value without getting anyone too hot under the collar. (A recent one of this ilk looked at the experience of trans and non-binary students.) But more intriguingly, those HEPI reports that have been deemed controversial have not generally been the ones I thought in advance would be.

And each one is now seared on my mind.

A UKIP Licence

The first of these, published back in 2015, proposed a National Licence to give everyone with a UK Internet Protocol address access at no upfront charge to past and present academic research. The associated backend costs were designed to be covered by government payments to publishers.

FE lecturers and some health professionals welcomed the idea wholeheartedly, as they tended to think better access to the latest and past research would help them do their jobs. However, the more headbanger-ish element of the open-access world thought it outrageous that free access might be limited, at least initially, only to those in the UK. They also disliked the fact that publishers would continue to receive material payments.

As you would have needed a UK IP address to benefit from the National Licence and as the UK Independence Party was then riding high, the critics amusingly caricatured the paper as a ‘UKIP’ idea. Less amusingly, one academic called for it to be withdrawn, only to rescind this when it was suggested that this might be illiberal – before changing his mind once more and calling again for a ban.

The paper is still available but the National Licence idea has not made any progress and the major challenge of poor access to academic output for those without institutional log-ins (including policymakers, not to mention think-tank staff…) remains. 

Boys to Men

The second controversial piece – produced in 2016 – was on the education of boys, who fall far behind girls in our education system. This, sadly, also remains a big problem that no government has gripped (though it’s not too late for the current Government to do so). Our paper was condemned, for example by the then leadership of the National Union of Students (NUS), for emphasising sex rather than class.

At the time, I said the report seemed to have been treated like an embarrassing relative who sits in the corner at family gatherings spouting politically incorrect nonsense.

In response to such condemnation, we pointed out that it is possible to be worried about more than one issue at a time and that, as disadvantaged girls tend to do a little better than disadvantaged boys, sex seems one important factor to consider alongside all the others when assessing outcomes.

The challenges in this area are perhaps a little better understood these days than they were a few years ago – thanks to excellent work from people like Richard Reeves, a Brit who is now the President of the American Institute for Boys and Men and who has written an whole book on the topic and who recently spoke at a really good Bright Blue event on the issue). So when we return to the topic, as we would like to do early in 2025, perhaps it will be less fraught.

Grammar schools for all

The third row was predictable. It occurred six years ago, on the back of a HEPI piece by the right-of-centre policy wonk Iain Mansfield. He defended grammar schools and their impressive record in getting BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) pupils into the most selective universities, such as the University of Cambridge.

This paper (like the one on the National Licence) appeared in HEPI’s Debate Paper series, which is more polemical in its approach than HEPI’s other papers, for we knew it might stoke a row. Yet after publication of Iain’s paper, which had gone through our regular peer-review process as with all full-length HEPI papers, one well-respected expert in the sociology of education working at a Russell Group university declared HEPI should ‘disband’.

However, most of the opposition to Iain’s paper was classier. Unlike other – more ideological – think tanks, we invariably encourage people who disagree with something we have published to write for us too. So we encouraged the critics to gather together under two Oxford academics to produce a strong HEPI paper of their own that responded to Iain’s work in the form of a series of essays. 

In their respective pieces, Iain and his critics were largely focusing on different issues – Iain looked mainly at access to selective higher education on leaving grammar school and the collection of essays concentrated mainly on how grammar school systems tend to work against the interests of those who are shut out from them. While the debate was angry in parts, it was properly evidence based and therefore very illuminating.

As someone who lives in part of the country where nearly all children still take the 11+, I found the discussion usefully educational and took something from both sides. Iain as the initial protagonist and someone who thrives on intellectual debate certainly welcomed it.

Helping postgraduate parents

The row in 2024, in contrast, came as a complete surprise. It was prompted by a HEPI Policy Note on the lack of childcare support for parents who are early career researchers.

The paper, written for HEPI by the GW4 group of universities in England and Wales, was based on the personal testimonies of postgraduate parents. It argued that postgraduate parents should become entitled to the same support that is available to undergraduate parents:

the current approach does not provide the right incentives to support social mobility through education. Extending the current undergraduate Childcare Grant to postgraduate students would seem a logical first step to support the most economically disadvantaged.

The paper also explained that the authors knew their proposals would not solve all the problems faced by postgraduate parents:

While GW4 acknowledges that this would not be a panacea for all postgraduates, extending the support to those with the greatest need would be a welcome first step to ensure parity of policy.

So the authors also floated going further:

A future step such as expanding the 30 free hours, so that childcare does not continue to be a barrier to the reskilling and career progression opportunities that postgraduate studies can provide, is worthy of consideration if the ambitions of the R&D People and Culture Strategy are to be delivered.

This seemed a relatively uncontroversial conclusion, not least because it was in tune with HEPI’s earlier uncontested work pointing out how postgraduate researchers often fall through the gap between student support and employee benefits. Moreover, all our other work on improving the lives of early career researchers had been widely welcomed; in 2024 alone, this included a collection of essays with the British Academy and a study of the career progression of Black early-career academics with the Society of Black Academics and GatenbySanderson.

So we assumed that, if only we could secure engagement with its contents, then the HEPI / GW4 Policy Note calling for modest improvements in the support for postgraduate parents in England would also land on fertile soil. Yet the outcry from a small number of those who read it and who thought it did not go far enough was extraordinary.

Playing the ball not the person

The process for putting a paper of this sort together takes months and, during this time, we had lots of fascinating conversations about whether the proposals should be bolder, whether or not we should argue that England should simply and immediately copy the generous arrangements in Wales (even though Wales is better funded thanks to the Barnett formula) and which arm of the state should have responsibility for childcare support for postgraduates. The wording about better short-term arrangements only being a ‘first step’ reflected these discussions.

Although the Policy Note was not my work, I used my social media channels to help publicise it and so drew much of the ire from academics on X / Twitter. Initially, I was asked why we wanted to block people from ‘feeding our families’. Later, and after I had pointed out this criticism seemed not to be based on a close reading of the actual paper, I was called ‘unhinged’ and accused of ‘misogyny’ and ‘everyday sexism’. One message about the report was tagged with ‘VAWG’, which I learnt stands for ‘violence against women and girls’. Remember, our paper proposed introducing – not restricting or abolishing – childcare support for postgraduate parents, and with a focus (initially) on the poorest ones most in need.

Anyone serious about helping postgraduates should surely avoid the sort of attack that only serves to deter people from becoming involved in policymaking in the first place. At HEPI, we will always have the back of anyone who writes for us (irrespective of whether individual members of HEPI staff personally agree with them or not), but people are still bound to be put off if they find their peers prefer to play the person not the ball the minute they arrive on the pitch.

Put simply, not everyone is able to respond to attacks in the wonderful way that the Cambridge academic Dr Ally Louks has been doing so effectively in recent weeks. Perhaps we could all learn something useful from her.

Policymaking is hard…

Successful policymaking is hard. It relies on lots of people putting their heads above the parapet to light a better way. HEPI wants to encourage debate across the whole range of higher education policy issues, but that needs a conducive environment in which to flourish. If we really are serious about producing a better environment for postgraduate students – and as our work consistently shows, HEPI certainly is – then we need a constant stream of new ideas, persuasive papers and open debate.

At HEPI, we remain committed to encouraging a positive environment and, as a think tank publishing 35+ reports a year plus a daily blog, we rely on sourcing lots of good content, ideally from those at the coalface – and irrespective of whether they have written for policymakers before.

So just as we have encouraged those who want to go further than we proposed in the GW4 / HEPI report on postgraduate parents to write an alternative piece for us (currently without success), we also encourage others to make it their New Year’s Resolution to write for HEPI. If you are even mildly tempted, our Instructions for Bloggers can be found here and our Instructions for Authors are here.