A look back at 2024/25: HEPI’s Annual Review

• Today, HEPI is publishing its Annual Review for 2024/25. A summary is cut and pasted below and the full document is available here.

Overview

The Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) is an Oxford-based charity founded in 2002 ‘to promote research into and understanding of all aspects of higher education and to disseminate the useful results of such research for the education of policy makers and the general public in the United Kingdom’. This Annual Review looks at the work of the Institute between August 2024 and July 2025.

HEPI had a successful year, whichever way that is measured. Most notably, perhaps, the number of HEPI’s corporate Partners was at its highest ever level. As a result, aside from the previous year (which included the 2024 General Election), the number of HEPI publications and events were at record levels. The available evidence also suggests HEPI’s work had more impact among policymakers, regulators and institutional leaders.

Key pieces of research in 2024/25 include HEPI’s regular surveys: the HEPI / Advance HE Student Academic Experience Survey; the HEPI / Kortext Student Generative AI Survey; and the HEPI / Unite Students Applicant Index. We also published the annual HEPI / LSBU English Social Mobility Index and the HEPI Soft-Power Index.

Other notable themes covered by HEPI’s full-length reports in 2024/25 include: the role of third-space research professionals; the lives of Black early-career researchers (with the Society of Black Academics and GatenbySanderson); awarding gaps by gender at Oxbridge (written by one of HEPI’s graduate interns); the educational underachievement of boys and young men (sponsored by Ulster University); the extent to which school and college curricula prepare people for higher education (sponsored by the University of Chester); what devolution has meant for higher education 20 years on (sponsored by the Education Group); the impact of menstruation on learning (sponsored by the University of St Andrews); the continuing decline of language learning (sponsored by Duolingo); and entrepreneurial leadership (with the NCEE).

There were 33 HEPI events in 2024/25, higher than in every previous year except for the election year of 2023/24. These included 13 roundtable discussions hosted with HEPI Partners, 11 webinars and nine in-person events. The HEPI Annual Conference, which had the title ‘Before, During, After: The route through higher education in changing times’, included presentations from the Chief Executives of Universities UK, UCAS and the Office for Students.

HEPI’s impact was felt in Government, Parliament and the media, with the organisation’s work being regularly quoted in official documents, ministerial speeches and parliamentary debates as well as in national, local and specialist media. In June 2025, HEPI’s impact was publicly marked when the Director, Nick Hillman, was awarded an OBE in His Majesty the King’s Birthday Honours for ‘services to higher education’.2 • HEPI Annual Review 2024/2025

If 2022/23 was primarily about fully recovering to a pre-COVID position in terms of HEPI’s output and 2023/24 was partly focused on election-themed work, then 2024/25 was characterised by a near-record output while undergoing modernisation – including a major visual rebrand and a new website, both going live early in 2025/26, and progress on the adoption of a new Customer-Relationship Management (CRM) tool.

The HEPI staff team was generally stable in 2024/25, though we sadly said goodbye to our Policy Manager, Josh Freeman, at the very end of the year, when he left to become a Strategy Manager at the Office for Students. There was also stability among HEPI’s Trustees and Advisory Board, with continuing oversight from HEPI’s Chair, Professor Dame Sally Mapstone.

This Annual Review provides further detail on HEPI’s recent performance and is part of our long-standing commitment to be to be one of the most transparent think tanks in the UK.