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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].

  • The Augar report and the not-so-missing middle

    5 July 2019 by Dr Greg Walker, Chief Executive of MillionPlus, the Association for Modern Universities.

    MillionPlus has been at the forefront of organisations calling for the Level 4 and 5 education space in England to be revived as an outcome of the Augar process and it is pleasing to see this agenda picked up in the report. These important qualifications, such as Foundation degrees or…

  • The future for Augar is political

    4 July 2019

    Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of speaking at Wonkhe’s conference on Augar, in the final session of the day, alongside Rachel Wolf, on the politics of the report. Here are my remarks. On the day the Augar report appeared, I said on the radio that it felt like…

  • How Informed Choices can help support access to competitive universities

    3 July 2019 by Sarah Stevens

    This a guest blog, by Sarah Stevens, Director of Policy at the Russell Group is kindly contributed as a response to a HEPI blog, by Hugo Dale-Harris “Will new online guidance on ‘facilitating subjects’ help or hinder fair access to highly-selective universities?” Recently, the Russell Group launched a new interactive website to host our Informed Choices guide explaining how subject…

  • Is students’ well-being what really matters?

    2 July 2019 by Dean Machin

    This guest blog from Dean Machin, Strategic Policy Adviser at the University of Portsmouth responds to the debate around the publication of HEPI’s Policy note 13 on measuring wellbeing in higher education. He writes in a personal capacity.  Universities are investing more resources in their students’ well-being. This is right.…

  • Why Augar’s confusion provides a clear sense of where the TEF should go in the future

    1 July 2019 by Paul Ashwin, Professor of Higher Education at Lancaster University

    As we await the outcomes of Dame Shirley Pearce’s review of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), it is worth reflecting on what Sir Philip Augar’s Post 18 Review of Education and Funding tells us about the possible future of the TEF. In doing so, it is first worth considering four…

  • Five Challenges to Address During University Strategy Development

    29 June 2019 by Mike Baxter, Goal Atlas

    In a previous article on the HEPI blog we reported one of the results from our University Strategy 2020 research report: 63% of UK universities are due to renew their strategy over next year or the year after. This was based on an analysis of a sample of 52 university…

  • Forget the 2.4% target for research and development spending

    28 June 2019 by Nick Hillman

    When higher education policy conversations turn to research, they tend to dwell upon the UK Government’s commitment to increase the share of GDP spent on research and development (R&D) by public and private sources to 2.4% by 2027. This is a huge amount of money – more than three times…

  • Five reasons for universities to develop their partnerships with industry

    26 June 2019 by Joan Fennelly and Lucy Haire, Oracle UK Higher Education

    A lot is (rightly) expected of universities. Most commentators agree that the UK’s universities punch above their weight in terms of rankings, reputation and return on investment. Yet the pressure is on to maintain, explain and even improve this positioning. The UK’s current political instability and its ever-changing higher education…

  • The sector has to act now on the climate emergency

    24 June 2019 by Joy Carter

    A guest blog kindly contributed by Professor Joy Carter, Vice-Chancellor at the University of Winchester Together as a sector, we need to re-evaluate what we do and to make the climate emergency a higher priority than it is at present. There are some notable exceptions, but the higher education sector…