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, Rose Stephenson, at [email protected].
The august Office for Budget Responsibility is crucial to economic forecasting and limiting economic shocks by providing independent oversight of economic decisions. The importance of its role in policy in modern Britain is hard to exaggerate. One of the inputs into its modelling on the economy is student numbers. The…
This blog was kindly contributed by Matt Sisson, Head of Membership at the British Universities Finance Directors Group (BUFDG). Universities are complex and unique organisations, with an impact that stretches beyond teaching and research on contained campuses. They have become key anchors in their local communities and regional hubs of…
This guest blog was kindly contributed by Bethan Cornell, a PhD student in Physics at King’s College London. She lives in her own place, with her partner. A note about terminology: HESA provide data specifically for postgraduate research, excluding postgraduate taught master’s students. Postgraduate research students are often missed out…
This guest blog was kindly contributed by Will Woods, Principal and CEO of the Open College of the Arts, part of the University of the Creative Arts group. What does a student look like in 2019? It is a question I would like to have asked Theresa May when she…
In a new initiative this year, HEPI is publishing an Annual Review. This is an edited version of a private report prepared each year for our Trustees and has not been published before. The short (four-page) report recaps our work from August 2018 to July 2019, covering: 25 pieces of…
Few people bother to read entire election manifestos. Indeed, even some candidates standing for election do not read their own party’s manifesto from cover to cover. But even though manifestos are a very far-from-perfect guide as to what will happen in the years ahead, they are important because they are…
This week marks a year since I first joined HEPI as Director of Policy and Advocacy and it seems I couldn’t have picked a more interesting year to do so. In that year, I’ve seen three higher education ministers (Gymiah, Skidmore, Johnson and then Skidmore again), two Brexit deadlines passed…
I am sometimes asked why HEPI doesn’t publish more policy papers by academics, given that all our output relates to higher education which, by definition, academics know about. It is a good question and one for which I probably do not have the perfect reply. (I am taking ‘academics’ here…
This blog is an edited transcript of a speech delivered at the HEPI / PwC conference on the value of higher education by Felicity Mitchell, Independent Adjudicator at the Office of the Independent Adjudicator. An introduction to the Office of the Independent Adjudicator We run the student complaints scheme, reviewing…
We are delighted to host this guest blog by Jonathan Michie, the President of Kellogg College, Oxford. A new report published today calls on all universities to provide adult education and lifelong learning. Indeed, it recommends that this should become a requirement for using the protected term ‘university’. No adult education and lifelong…