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…
Universities are at a critical time of change, balancing the need to innovate with the many challenges they face to delivering the world-class education for which our sector is known; tight budgets, staff juggling multiple responsibilities and students needing more support. At Jisc, we believe that digital innovation isn’t yet…
New Vice-Chancellors have taken office in Oxford and Cambridge since the beginning of 2023, Oxford’s in January and Cambridge’s on 5 July. The Committee of University Chairs’ Code of Governance requires a governing body ‘to appoint the Head of Institution as Chief Executive’. Oxford and Cambridge do not belong to…