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Nick Hillman

  • In the years of waiting for a full response, it’s become clear the Augar review is a smörgåsbord not a prix fixe. But while policymakers have been deliberating, universities have been delivering.

    1 February 2022 by Nick Hillman

    This month, February 2022, marks four years since the Augar panel was set up to review post-18 education in England. They reported in May 2019, by which time it felt like we had been waiting ages and longer than anyone had originally expected. But when compared to the Government’s dilatory…

  • Free speech dinner

    28 January 2022 by Nick Hillman

    HEPI is hosting a private dinner on academic freedom and free speech, which we hope will result in future HEPI written output on the topic. By invitation only.

  • Wine tasters, super crunchers and King Canute – what do they tell us about the new regulatory burdens from the Office for Students?

    21 January 2022 by Nick Hillman

    The flurry of important new documents from the Office for Students will be pored over for months, particularly between now and the end of the consultation period in March 2022. Most notably, the OfS wants to assess institutions on their students’ continuation, completion and progression rates. Institutions that fall below certain thresholds…

  • Five common predictions about COVID and education that now appear to be wrong

    18 January 2022 by Nick Hillman

    No one would dispute that COVID-19 has severely disrupted the education of millions of people. Our polling with Advance HE, for example, shows an unprecedented proportion of undergraduate students think they have received ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’ value for money and twice as many as usual feel their experiences have been…

  • What were people reading in 2021?

    31 December 2021 by Nick Hillman

    Here, on the last day of a year that many people will be pleased to see the back of, is our Top 40 most popular HEPI website pages of 2021. (The list is restricted to blogs and news stories so excludes, for example, our ever-changing home page.) I am struck…

  • Choosing student accommodation? What do you need to know?

    21 December 2021 by Nick Hillman

    At HEPI, we’ve published lots of work on student accommodation in recent years – sometimes in conjunction with accommodation providers and their charitable foundations – including: a history of student accommodation over the decades by the Reverend Professor William Whyte; a compendium of facts about student accommodation by Martin Blakey and Sarah Jones; and…

  • Is the culture war destroying ‘the central purpose of universities’?

    13 December 2021 by Nick Hillman

    the main burden for resisting the slow destruction of a cultural and educational heritage lies with academics themselves, but it is they – some of them, at least – who pose the main threat. They pose it, not because of any particular position they hold, or thoughts they are thinking,…

  • Who owns online lecture recordings

    30 November 2021 by Dr Alexis Brown

    As universities gear up for a new round of strikes, taking place from 1 December to 3 December 2021, they may wish to reuse online teaching materials recorded during the pandemic to limit the impact on students.  But a new report from the Higher Education Policy Institute reveals confusion over who…

  • All I want for Christmas is a consultation paper (or two) – by Nick Hillman

    29 November 2021 by Nick Hillman

    As we enter Advent, the higher education sector is gearing up for expected new consultations from the Department for Education. Here HEPI Director, Nick Hillman, takes stock of current policy debates, the impending industrial action and the continuing impact of COVID. The calm before the storm It may seem extraordinary,…

  • An open letter to the new Director for Fair Access and Participation

    24 November 2021 by Nick Hillman

    Dear John, Congratulations on your new appointment! We don’t know each other well but I have long admired your career from afar. You clearly care passionately about learners and ensuring they meet their potential. It is a huge and brilliant job that you are taking on, in fact one of…