This blog was kindly contributed by Amy Low, Service Delivery Director at AbilityNet. AbilityNet is a technology and digital accessibility charity that supports disabled people to achieve their objectives at home, at work and in education. They provide a range of services for individuals and organisations including 1-1 support services,…
This blog was kindly contributed by Professor David Phoenix, Vice-Chancellor, London South Bank University One year ago today we received ministerial approval for the designation of a new subsidiary, South Bank Colleges (SBC), to deliver further education. That same day, Lambeth College in south London merged with SBC, becoming part…
This blog was kindly contributed by Kim Ansell, Senior Advisor at Advance HE. It is the first of three blogs we will be running this week on the theme of value. In a time of increasing uncertainty and public scrutiny, higher education is facing an unprecedented challenge to articulate value…
This blog was written by Iain Mansfield, the author of the HEPI Occasional Paper The Impact of Selective Secondary Education on Progression to Higher Education (2019), a report written in a personal capacity prior to him taking up his current role. The paper published today by HEPI is, in parts,…
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…
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…
This blog was kindly contributed by Vincenzo Raimo, Visiting Fellow at the University of Reading and Chief Relationship Officer at Unilodgers. There have been a number of really interesting blog posts recently challenging us all to think about what a university experience in the UK might encompass and how it…