HEPI is not a lobby group nor a mission group but an independent charity. We do not, generally, respond to official consultations. But we make rare exceptions to this rule. So we responded to: the 2015 higher education green paper; the Diamond review of higher education funding in Wales in…
Today’s new educational exports strategy is welcome. It puts hard numbers on what we can achieve, which usefully focuses minds. There is a new target of £35 billion in education exports, including 600,000 international higher education students in the UK, by 2030. There are some caveats too of course: the…
There is a story on the front page of the Sunday Telegraph which says people with less than 3 Ds at A-Level won’t get funding to go to higher education. There is a clear precedent for this. Sir David Eccles, the Minister of Education, told the House of Commons in July 1960,…
HEPI has recently hosted book reviews of Melissa Benn’s ‘Life Lessons: The Case for a National Education Service’ and of ‘Social Mobility and its Enemies’ by Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin. Here, Nick Hillman reviews a third important new book about education and social mobility: ‘Engines of Privilege: Britain’s Private School…
We recently published a new report on the history of the Universities Superannuation (USS) Scheme. It received a warm reception for recounting the little-known history of the foundation of the USS and its first 30+ years of stability as well as the origins of recent troubles. @HEPI_news report on USS by is well…
In the past 15 years, the Labour Party has backed the tripling of undergraduate fees in England (at the 2005 election), supported a big cut in fees (at the 2015 election) and is now backing the abolition of fees (from the 2017 election onwards). Meanwhile, the Conservative Party has shifted…
There is a great deal of hope that the Government’s long-promised international education strategy will move the UK to a better place when it comes to educating people from other countries. I hope it does. Few other policy areas have so much positive evidence going for them. But writing and…
This guest blog responding to HEPI’s new report on university pensions has been kindly provided by Matt Waddup, the Head of Policy at the University and College Union. If you don’t know where you’ve come from, you don’t know where you’re going is the message that underpins Nick Hillman’s rags to riches story of the…
The role of a think tank is – in large part – to make potentially dry subjects interesting, engaging and impactful. But just sometimes, our job is the opposite. It is to try and help temper subjects that have become so divisive that it is hard to make reasonable progress.…