The official support recently made available to higher education institutions, such as the bringing forward of payments from the Student Loans Company to universities, relates almost wholly to home students. This is unsurprising: they are the students who receive support from UK taxpayers, who will foot the bill for any…
Bahram Bekhradnia founded HEPI in 2002 and was its Director until January 2014, since when he has been HEPI’s President. Before establishing HEPI, he was the Director of Policy for the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). This is his first HEPI blog. The Government’s introduction of controls over the…
In response to the announcements from the Department for Education and the Office for Students on support for institutions in the current crisis, Nick Hillman, Director of the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), said: While we need time to digest the finer details, this seems like a carefully-calibrated package that…
Summary Analysis of 17 universities reveals a continued rise in staff access to counselling and occupational health referrals since Pressure Vessels was published in 2019. From 2016 to 2018, there was an increase of 16% in counselling at the 14 universities for which comparable time series data were obtained. Over the same…
The Higher Education Policy Institute (www.hepi.ac.uk) is publishing a new report on the mental health and wellbeing of academic and professional services staff in universities. Pressure Vessels II: An update on mental health among higher education staff in the UK (HEPI Policy Note 23) by Dr Liz Morrish, a Visiting…
Surprise has been expressed that Universities UK’s (UUK) package of proposals for helping universities in the current crisis has not already been accepted by Ministers in Whitehall and by the devolved administrations. Today’s Financial Times front-page lead, for example, is headlined, ‘Universities’ plea for £2bn bailout falls on deaf ears…
Responding to the new report by London Economics and UCU, Impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on university finances, the Director of HEPI, Nick Hillman, said: It is great to see UCU and London Economics collaborating on such a detailed and important piece of work, which is based in part on…
Using almost 60,000 responses to the HEPI / Advance HE Student Academic Experience Survey collected between 2015 and 2019, this report considers if the UK still has a single higher education sector – from the perspective of students. Some important differences are revealed among locally-domiciled students studying in England, Scotland, Wales and…
The Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) has used evidence from nearly 60,000 full-time undergraduate students across the UK to answer the question of whether there is still a single UK higher education sector. One for all or all four one? Does the UK still have a single higher education sector? by…
This week’s row over universities shifting applicants from conditional to unconditional offers is a distraction from the bigger and more important picture being painted by the current Covid-19 crisis, writes Nick Hillman. There is a consensus across Government, the Office for Students and many commentators that recent offer-making behaviour by…