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].
This blog was kindly contributed by Dennis Sherwood, one of the UK’s leading experts in organisational creativity, innovation, systems thinking and system dynamics. PART ONE “There’s something missing!”, he said, setting down his briar. His companion peered over his newspaper. “How interesting! Another non-barking-dog case?” “Alas, no. But something that…
This blog was contributed by Megan Bowler, one of our Summer Interns. Megan is in her third year at the University of Oxford studying for an undergraduate degree in Classics. Time abroad is an obligatory feature of most Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) and MFL Joint Honours courses, offering students real-world…
This blog was kindly contributed by Richard Brabner, Director of the UPP foundation. Richard has written this article in a personal capacity and they reflect his own views rather than those of the UPP Foundation. Readers of this fabulous website will generally think, as I do, that the free speech…
This blog was kindly contributed by Jonathan Woodhead, Policy Adviser at Birkbeck, University of London. One of the striking features about the recent general election, along with the breaching of the ‘Red Wall’ of former Labour northern heartland seats, was the increasing dominance of Labour in our larger cities. As…
A senior member of a staff at a British university writes anonymously about what to expect from the new Government. Boris Johnson’s thumping majority means that he can do pretty much what he likes to the higher education sector. Assuming we don’t get a Secretary of State with a pathological…
Many people thought students could boost the election results for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. Over time, as the proper academic studies of the election drip out, we will come to know for certain if that happened or not. In the meantime, we have undertaken a quick-and-dirty exercise to test the proposition:…
This blog was kindly contributed by Dr Maria Neophytou, Director of Public Affairs at Impetus. 2019 has been a year of high political drama, unmatched by substantive policy change. Brexit has dominated, with domestic departments caught in a holding pattern. The Augar commission was launched by the last Prime Minister…
This blog was kindly contributed by Chris Millward, Director for Fair Access and Participation at the Office for Students and is written in response to HEPI’s recent report: ‘Social mobility and elite universities‘. If you found the general election campaign frustrating, spare a thought for the nation’s public officials, who…
...the only way to address this problem is to return to student number controls at an institutional level and require institutions to use entry quotas banded by grades above a minimum matriculation requirement to create mixed ability intakes across the board.
This has been an odd election. Many of the original expectations about it – such as the idea that the vote would be almost solely about Brexit or that the parties would eschew the leader-centric campaigning that didn’t work for Theresa May or that smaller parties would benefit from greater…