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].
While there are always plenty of topics to be grappling with in higher education, there tends to be one issue that dominates the discussion. For 2019 this was the Augar review, despite the fact the independent panel was originally due to report in 2018. Throughout the year those of us…
This blog was kindly contributed by Kim Ansell, Senior Advisor at Advance HE. It is the first of three blogs we will be running this week on the theme of value. In a time of increasing uncertainty and public scrutiny, higher education is facing an unprecedented challenge to articulate value…
This blog was written by Iain Mansfield, the author of the HEPI Occasional Paper The Impact of Selective Secondary Education on Progression to Higher Education (2019), a report written in a personal capacity prior to him taking up his current role. The paper published today by HEPI is, in parts,…
This blog is by Riddi Viswanathan, a graduate entrepreneur leading Generation Purple, which aims to enhance diversity in graduate recruitment through gaming technology. As a graduate entrepreneur who has recently entered the digital technology sector, I am thrilled by the opportunities on offer, especially for international students like me with…
Every year, HEPI starts our annual programme of events with three parliamentary breakfast seminars, co-hosted with our Partner organisation Advance HE and kindly sponsored for many years by the long-standing Labour MP Barry Sheerman. This year’s series kicks off next week, on Thursday 30 January, when we will consider ‘The geo-politics…
John Claughton, former Chief Master of King Edward’s School, Birmingham offers some reflections on Megan Bowler’s recent report on the crisis in modern languages. Nestor, the king of sandy Pylos, is the grand old man of The Iliad. He has seen the passing of two generations of mankind and is…
This guest blog has been kindly contributed by John Plowright, a former History teacher in an independent school and the author of various History textbooks, who has advised hundreds of pupils on their admission to higher education, including Oxbridge. Oxbridge, despite the best endeavours to widen access by the two…
This blog was kindly contributed by Dr John Butcher, Associate Director at The Open University . Emerging from the Christmas break into a new decade, I have been struck by the amount of looking back that has filled our media. Consequently, I too have been reflecting, this time on a…
Over the Christmas and new year period, there were more stories about building a UK ARPA, based on the US DARPA, which stands for Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency. Whether or not this is a good idea as a way of distributing research funding, and it may well be, has…
A little controversy At HEPI, we never set out to be controversial. But sometimes, inadvertently, we are. And never more so in the last year than with Iain Mansfield’s paper on grammar schools. When it came out, exactly a year ago on 10 January 2019, we were told the numbers…