This autumn, the Arts Council England funded Big Bookshare project at the University of Wolverhampton will invite hundreds of prisoners to join a book club and take part in a series of activities including creative writing workshops. The project is based on close engagement with prisoners themselves, but also on…
If you ask any UK Vice Chancellor what’s keeping them awake at night, it’s highly likely to be the financial sustainability of their institution and the wider sector. Years of frozen funding coupled with rising costs are inevitably taking their toll across all four nations. University leaders are also increasingly…
Ongoing media headlines about ‘low quality’ or ‘rip-off’ university courses are just the latest in a series of headlines relating to quality and standards that go back over twenty years to talk of ‘Mickey Mouse’ degrees. The political expectation is often a regulatory intervention that can raise questions about the…
With skills given top billing in government initiatives from the Innovation Strategy to the Levelling Up White Paper, the question put to a recent HEPI roundtable dinner was an important one: how can we persuade policymakers to be more ambitious about research and scholarship in creating a highly skilled and…
Professionally, I have had the privilege to ‘grow up’ in a unique environment – a relatively small and specialist college offering Higher Education (HE), which five years ago gained University Title, having achieved Taught Degree Awarding Powers in 2017. Over the 25+ years, I have seen a few higher education…
University Alliance has long been something of a Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) superfan. For years it made no sense for our higher education system to have a REF to measure research quality but no TEF to assess excellence in teaching. The vast majority of students who experience higher education do…
It’s been a long time, August 2019, since I submitted the Independent Review of TEF to the Secretary of State for Education and a lot of water has flown under Westminster, and other bridges, since that time. The review identified how important TEF had been in drawing attention to the…
Up and down the land in 2022, Word documents were opened, “Educational Gain” typed at the top, then the authors paused for a careful think. How to distil the purpose and value of higher education into this definition? How to differentiate our definition so that what makes our educational offering…
Today Jisc launches its digital transformation guide and toolkit which will support universities in assessing their digital maturity, planning their approach for and delivering digital transformation. For a more in-depth read on what has gone into producing this toolkit and what its aims are, Jisc’s Managing Director for HE and…
Much has been said and written about the (recently renamed) Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE) which will provide modular funding for Levels 4, 5 and 6 qualifications. A lot of the discourse assumes this will be mainly for part-time learning for older students wanting to upskill or reskill after a period…