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HEPI Guest Post

  • Open University plan 2030: Smash and Grab or Innovate at Walton Hall?

    4 April 2024 by Steven Cousins

    It is as though the Open University (OU) has suddenly discovered an oil reserve deep beneath the Walton Hall campus and is determined to drill and extract the market price, whatever the CO2 cost or the reputational damage might be. After all, the OU is renowned for its support for a…

  • New research showing the impact of outreach – only possible through collaboration

    3 April 2024 by Anna Anthony

    At a recent partnership event, John Blake, Director for Fair Access and Participation at the Office for Students (OfS), spoke about the important role of collaboration in increasing equality of opportunity in English higher education. Owing to the benefits successful partnerships can, and do, bring to the sector, John announced…

  • Do we really understand why Chinese students come to the UK?

    2 April 2024 by Pippa Ebel

    At the end of 2023, UCAS and Pearson issued a report on Chinese students in the UK, which looked into motivations for studying at British higher education institutions (HEIs). Findings revealed the reputation and quality of UK HEIs to be two main factors. Yet, all five options provided to UCAS/Pearson…

  • Which manifesto will unlock the potential of England’s Lifelong Learning Entitlement?

    2 April 2024 by Tim Blackman

    Tony Blair’s commitment that his Labour government would achieve 50 per cent participation in higher education was made in 1999, although the participation rate did not start rising substantially until the coalition government of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats ended England’s student number controls in 2013. More recently, however, the…

  • To meaningfully support GCSE attainment, the sector needs to dismantle its assumption of educational expertise and start collaborating effectively

    29 March 2024 by Alex Blower

    Over the last two years, pressure from policymakers for university outreach teams to play a strategic, proactive role in supporting the GCSE attainment of young people from underrepresented backgrounds has gradually increased. The debate about whether it is something that universities ‘should be doing’ rattles on. But the appointment of…

  • Is franchising out of control?

    27 March 2024 by Gill Evans

    Franchising, like Topsy, has ‘just growed’. The Higher Education and Research Act (2017) cast a wide net, containing all ‘providers of higher education’, whether or not they had degree-awarding powers or the right to be called ‘universities’. It included providers offering higher education only up to Level 4, leading to…

  • The quality of degree apprenticeships

    26 March 2024 by Rob Stroud

    It was in November 2022 that universities minister Robert Halfon famously told a House of Lords committee that “degree” and “apprenticeships” are his “two favourite words in the English language”. He has also said that he would like to see half of all university students registered on apprenticeship programmes. That…

  • Fairness for the COVID Generation

    25 March 2024 by Sasha Roseneil

    Four years ago, on 26 March 2020, the UK’s first COVID-19 lockdown came into force and our lives changed overnight. As we saw the death toll rise, it was apparent that the elderly, the vulnerable, the sick and all those who cared for them were facing considerable risk. For the younger…