Yesterday I spoke to a careers guidance conference. It was very good to interact directly with those who are in charge of giving advice to young people on their futures. As I said in my speech, my own experience as a secondary school teacher running a pre-university course showed me…
Having travelled a lot over the last few weeks, I’ve been musing on HE in other countries. Perhaps nowhere are the differences so stark as in two of the countries I’ve visited: Australia and North Korea. In 2012, Australia removed student number controls for undergraduate places at public universities. With…
University Alliance and the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) will be holding a joint expert policy seminar comparing higher education funding in England and Australia on Thursday, 24 April. This event is open to all. Register here.
The new report on Estimating the public cost of student loans authored by the Institute for Fiscal Studies and sponsored by Universities UK is an important and detailed piece of work. Let me try and explain why. Point 1: It confirms the Government’s warnings about the inherent sensitivities in calculating a…
As Chief Executive of University Alliance I am often asked to talk about the value of higher education, why we need more graduates in the economy and the need for smart investment in teaching and research. But I don’t always get to look at the detail of how this funding…
HEPI Report (66) provides a comparison of the English and Australian higher education funding systems, specifically the student loan arrangements. The report focuses on four themes: entitlement; default rates; the balance between public and private contributions; and repayment. Alongside this report, HEPI has published a more detailed piece on the…
As the Australian Education Minister, Christopher Pyne, touches down in the UK on a fact-finding trip, the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) publishes two new comparisons of the English and Australian higher education systems: A summary report: A comparison of student loans in England and Australia by Nick Hillman, Director of HEPI…
Earlier this month, the NUS annual conference took place in Liverpool. Toni Pearce, the NUS’s formidable President, was comfortably re-elected. It’s 15 years since I was a delegate at the NUS conference. It was in Blackpool, rather lively (£1,000 tuition fees had just been introduced) and a Robbie Williams impersonator…
There are few issues in higher education as lively as widening access and there is a vast literature on it. BIS recently published Hefce and Offa’s National Strategy on Access and Student Success – on which Hepi had an exclusive blog by Les Ebdon, the Director for Fair Access. The Higher…
The national strategy for access and student success By Professor Les Ebdon, Director of Fair Access to Higher Education I’m delighted that the Government has now published the national strategy for access and student success which OFFA and HEFCE developed at its behest. It’s an ambitious strategy that makes wide-ranging…