Free speech dinner
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.
Nick Hillman
Wine tasters, super crunchers and King Canute – what do they tell us about the new regulatory burdens from the Office for Students?
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
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?
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?
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’?
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
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
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
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…
Who controls higher education policy?: A review of the biography of Jeremy Heywood
HEPI Director Nick Hillman delves into the biography of the most important UK civil servant of modern times, Jeremy Heywood, to search out lessons on how higher education policy is set at the centre of Whitehall. During a recent period of COVID-induced isolation, I finally got around to reading What Does…