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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].

  • Working with the media…

    30 March 2017 by Nick Hillman

    Our new paper by Richard Garner, available on the Publications page, is chock full of anecdotes illustrating his arguments about the best ways for higher education institutions to engage with the media. Here are three of the best. Social media Gone, hopefully, are the days I encountered while working as Education…

  • Article 50: Triggering a future full of ‘Bregrets’ for UK students?

    29 March 2017 by Diana Beech

    Today – the day that the UK Prime Minister will trigger Article 50 and begin the UK’s two-year journey towards exiting the European Union (EU) – UK students remain concerned about Brexit. As the generation that will have the longest to live with the consequences of the UK’s departure from…

  • Should students be free to register with different doctors for home and away?

    27 March 2017 by Dr Dominique Thompson

    Last year, HEPI recommended letting students register at two GP surgeries – one for where they are during term and the other for the rest of the year. Many people welcomed the idea but, Dr Dominique Thompson, Honorary Secretary of the Student Health Association, argues in this guest blog that…

  • Posters in Parliament: Lessons for the sector?

    24 March 2017 by Diana Beech

    It’s been a week since I had the pleasure of serving on the judging panel for this year’s Posters in Parliament competition organised by the British Conference of Undergraduate Research (BCUR). The competition aims to showcase the high quality of undergraduate research taking place in universities across the country, giving MPs and…

  • Why does the Office for National Statistics fail to measure the UK’s educational exports?

    10 March 2017 by James Pitman, Managing Director Higher Education UK & Europe, Study Group

    This guest blog has been kindly written for HEPI by James Pitman, Managing Director Higher Education UK & Europe, Study Group Education is one of our most successful export sectors. It is our fifth largest services sector and the second biggest contributor to our net balance of payments. So why…

  • International Women’s Day: Tales of Success or Survival?

    8 March 2017 by Diana Beech

    Today, on International Women’s Day, it is only right that we celebrate the successes of women in higher education. After all, we live in a world where the majority of students at our universities are women. This is quite a change from the last century: the Universities of Oxford and…

  • The TEF: an idiot’s guide to the arguments for and against

    6 March 2017

    HEPI has probably published more critiques of the new Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) than any other organisation. Four of these are shown in the slide below, and there have been other pieces – such as blogs – alongside. While it is easy to criticise elements of the TEF (not least the metrics),…

  • Education spending across the age range

    28 February 2017

    This post is an extract of a speech by Nick Hillman, HEPI Director, to the Institute for Fiscal Studies at the launch of their paper on education spending across the age range. This important new piece of work from the Institute for Fiscal Studies on education spending fills a hole…

  • Rising to the challenge

    23 February 2017 by Rod Bristow

    This guest blog responding to HEPI’s new report on BTECs as a route to higher education has been kindly provided by Rod Bristow, President, Core Markets for Pearson. A recent editorial in the Guardian noted that ‘England’s beleaguered vocational education system has been subjected to wave after wave of reform. Yet improving…

  • What more might universities do to promote entrepreneurship?

    21 February 2017 by Loris Raimo

    In this guest blog, Loris Raimo, a student at Trinity College, Oxford, argues we won’t achieve the ambitions in the new Industrial Strategy until we fix our education system to create more entrepreneurs. The latest Government Industrial Strategy talks about the importance of entrepreneurs and the need to identify barriers to entrepreneurship, but it is silent on…