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].
My response to last week’s National Student Survey results focused on question 26, which is generally ignored by everyone but is actually the question which always seems to score the lowest results of all. It is about the utility of student unions. It is, admittedly, an odd question that implies…
This is a guest blog from Dr Richard Budd, from the Centre for Higher Education Research and Evaluation (CHERE) at Lancaster University. The National Student Survey (NSS) has supposedly tracked the quality of undergraduate provision across the UK since 2005. It is apposite that universities are encouraged to pay attention…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…