The wonderful human geographer Danny Dorling has expounded on his long-held view that our student finance system was designed by the rich to hammer the poor in a new essay for Wonkhe entitled ‘Why student loans are a confidence trick for the 85%‘. This claims student loans have been implemented…
On Monday, 16th October 2017, Unite Students are publishing a new report on the non-academic parts of the student experience entitled ‘Everyone In: Insights from a diverse student population‘. The following blog is HEPI’s response to the important findings, which also appears in the document itself. It is sometimes said higher education is the only…
This blog about the Conservative party Conference by HEPI’s Director, Nick Hillman, first appeared at the weekend on the website of Research Fortnight (at http://www.researchresearch.com/news/article/?articleId=1370475). See @HE_Analyst on Twitter for further information. The number seven has many special properties. There are seven days of the week, seven colours of the rainbow, seven notes in a musical scale, seven ages of…
In this HEPI Occasional Paper, Sir Anthony Seldon and Dr Alan Martin explore the concept of a ‘positive university’ by looking at the approaches used by positive psychology and mindfulness. With increasing concern about the health of students and staff, this report considers the importance of a proactive approach to…
Leading educationalist Sir Anthony Seldon and the University of Buckingham’s Dean of Psychology Alan Martin have drawn up a 10-point plan for the creation of a ‘positive university’ based on the approaches used by positive psychology and mindfulness. Sir Anthony launched the country’s first positive university at Buckingham, where he…
The main currency of politics is killer facts: striking points that move a debate on. In higher education, current killer facts include the claim from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) that the poorest graduates in England leave university with debts of £57,000 and that interest on student loans has…
The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Students held a lively discussion in the House of Commons earlier this week on the topical issue of the ‘student voice’. We are reproducing here, with permission, the helpful note produced to stimulate the conversation. The All-Party Group, is chaired by Paul Blomfield MP (who…
This is a speech that Nick Hillman, the Director of the Higher Education Policy Institute made this afternoon to an academic conference in central London. Introduction I have been asked to speak on ‘Brexit: How it will affect universities’. Of course, Brexit has not happened yet and, if there is one thing…
Recently, someone asked me which HEPI reports had been most widely read. There is no perfect way to measure this because we send out the same number of hard copies of each report and it is up to the recipients to decide whether to read them or not. It is…
Last week, the Universities UK Annual Conference at Brunel University was all over the newspapers, particularly in relation to the important speech by Jo Johnson, the Minister for Universities. But somewhere on the wall in the Gents’ loo in Brunel’s students’ union building was a message that could be more…