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Blog

The HEPI Blog aims to make brief, incisive contributions to the higher education policy landscape. It is circulated to our subscribers and published online. We welcome guest submissions, which should follow our Instructions for Blog Authors. Submissions should be sent to our Blog Editor, Josh Freeman, at [email protected].

  • Why it’s time to start focusing on the wellbeing of PhD students

    26 June 2020 by Diana Beech

    This guest blog was kindly written and contributed in a personal capacity by Dr Diana Beech, Head of Government Affairs at the University of Warwick and former Policy Adviser to the last three Ministers of State for Universities and Science. She was also HEPI’s first Director of Policy and Advocacy.…

  • Taking the temperature: Technology’s turning point

    25 June 2020 by Lucy Haire & Eileen Smith

    This blog was kindly contributed by Lucy Haire and Eileen Smith from Oracle. Today’s blog is the third this week we have posted on edtech, the first was on the student experience and the second was on e-assessment. One bright spot within the pandemic is that it has pushed information…

  • An earthquake is coming for universities

    24 June 2020 by Andrew George

    This blog was kindly contributed by Andrew JT George, executive coach and consultant in education and healthcare. Andrew has previously held senior positions in Brunel University London and Imperial College London. Deep underground, tectonic plates bump and grind against each other, building immense pressure. The tensions remain latent and unrecognised…

  • E-assessment: a new dawn or a dead end?

    23 June 2020 by Nicholas Freestone

    This blog was kindly contributed by Nicholas Freestone, Associate Professor in Physiology and Pharmacology and the Higher Education Academy’s / Royal Society of Biology’s UK HE Bioscience Teacher of the Year in 2014/15. This year, Nicholas is in the running for a Guardian University Award as Course Director of a…

  • Learning from lockdown: harnessing tech to improve the student experience

    22 June 2020 by David Maguire

    This blog was kindly contributed by Professor David Maguire, Chair of Jisc and interim Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Dundee (as well as a member of the HEPI Advisory Board). The recent transition to online learning has been as rapid as it has been impressive. Many universities have…

  • The LockedDown Opportunity

    19 June 2020 by Dr. Leeza Osipenko, Dr. Sultan Alotaibi, Alexandra Schuster, Dr. Bernardo Perez & Ksenya Prudyus

    This blog was kindly contributed by by Dr. Leeza Osipenko, Dr. Sultan Alotaibi, Alexandra Schuster, Dr. Bernardo Perez and Ksenya Prudyus from the London School of Economics. The team at LSE Health Policy is running The LockedDown initiative in collaboration with HealthBit collecting global experiences of university students and staff…

  • Have teachers been set up to fail?

    18 June 2020 by Dennis Sherwood

    This new blog has been written by Dennis Sherwood, who has been tracking the story of this year’s school exams for HEPI. Friday, 12 June was the deadline for schools to submit their ‘centre assessment grades’ and rank orders for this year’s GCSE, AS and A-level students, and over the…

  • Inaccurate graduate employment data helps no-one

    17 June 2020 by Paul Hayes, Dean Machin & Paul Spendlove

    This blog was kindly contributed by Paul Hayes, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Dean Machin, Strategic Policy Adviser, and Paul Spendlove, Graduate Outcomes Manager, at the University of Portsmouth. Earlier this year we wrote for HEPI about the unenviable challenge HESA faces in introducing its new Graduate Outcome Survey. We were worried that…

  • Why and how the post-Covid world could offer more opportunities for widening participation in England

    16 June 2020 by Renata Albuquerque, Sam Dunnett, Annette Hayton, Colin McCaig & Anna Mountford-Zimdars

    This blog was kindly contributed by five co-authors: Renata Albuquerque, Widening participation Manager (Languages & Communities), SOAS, London Sam Dunnett, Head of Widening Participation, University of Sussex Annette Hayton, Senior Research Fellow, Department of Education, University of BathColin McCaig, Professor of Higher Education at Sheffield Hallam University Anna Mountford-Zimdars, Professor…

  • How can we best use Graduate Teaching Assistants during the Covid-19 pandemic?

    15 June 2020 by Bethan Cornell

    This blog was written by current HEPI intern and KCL Physics PhD student Bethan Cornell. Bethan has written on the blog before on a range of postgraduate topics covering accommodation and climate change. In normal circumstances, universities rely on the help of Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) for the smooth running…