When we start planning each year’s HEPI Annual Conference – which this year is taking place on 13 June at a prestigious central London venue – our first act is always to check our informal ‘HE clash calendar’. Higher education policy is such a busy field these days that it can…
HEPI Director Nick Hillman looks back on what Theresa May’s premiership has meant for higher education and universities. Back in 2015, during her final Conservative Party Conference speech as Home Secretary, Theresa May took a sharp dart from the box labelled ‘populism’ and fired it directly at universities: I don’t…
Across the higher education sector, we see increasing numbers of staff being referred to counselling and occupational health services. This report attributes the deterioration to factors such as excessive workloads, insecure employment and punitive metrics-driven performance management policies and argues that universities need to become healthier environments in order for…
A new Occasional Paper from the Higher Education Policy Institute reveals a big increase in the number of university staff accessing counselling and occupational health services. Pressure Vessels: The epidemic of poor mental health among higher education staff , HEPI Occasional Paper 20, by Dr Liz Morrish includes new data…
One issue on which most academics agree is how not to judge the value of different university courses. But, unfortunately, no one can agree on the right way to do it. This matters because the lack of consensus cedes power to people who may care less about the health of our sector.…
Each year, HEPI and Advance HE publish the Student Academic Experience Survey. It was originally designed to track alterations in the student experience as student finance changes. The Survey started in 2006, in the months before £3,000 fees came in, and has continued through the various financial changes since, including the…
The UCL Institute of Education regularly hosts fascinating ‘What if …‘ debates about topical education issues, expertly chaired by Professor Becky Francis. I have just had the pleasure of taking part in one on access to higher education alongside Anna Vignoles, Paul Jump and Claire Fox. My speech is below,…
Tonight, a new book on the state of independent education will be officially launched by Routledge. With 57 short contributions, many of the authors will be well-known to HEPI’s readers for they include a Vice Chancellor, a peer, various academics, a former special adviser to a Conservative Secretary of State for Education, think tankers, an education journalist and a former Labour Secretary of State for Education. My own chapter in the book draws comparisons between independent schools and UK universities. It is reprinted below, with kind permission of Routledge. The post-war school system in England and Wales was established by the 1944 Education Act. Section 81 of the Act that enabled Local Education Authorities…
Last week, I was copied in to more tweets from other people than I have ever been before. It started when I was quoted in an article in The Times that was headlined ‘University grades: firsts for quarter of students with lowest A levels’ and which discussed the number of…
I have a niece who is studying ethics as part of one of her GCSEs. Whenever I see her, she asks me to pose difficult ethical issues for us to debate. So we chew the fat over what moral code should be built in to the design of autonomous vehicles,…