Blog

Tonight, a new book on the state of independent education will be officially launched by Routledge. With 57 short contributions, many of the authors will be well-known to HEPI’s readers for they include a Vice Chancellor, a peer, various academics, a former special adviser to a Conservative Secretary of State for Education, think tankers, an education journalist and a former Labour Secretary of State for Education. My own chapter in the book draws comparisons between independent schools and UK universities. It is reprinted below, with kind permission of Routledge. The post-war school system in England and Wales was established by the 1944 Education Act. Section 81 of the Act that enabled Local Education Authorities…

Last week, I was copied in to more tweets from other people than I have ever been before. It started when I was quoted in an article in The Times that was headlined ‘University grades: firsts for quarter of students with lowest A levels’ and which discussed the number of…

When I recently attended an event at the Resolution Foundation on the use of LEO data, someone said they thought we were the first country in the world to have this kind of linked data on graduate salaries available. My experience in Russia last month proved this not to be…

A guest blog kindly contributed by Dr Mike Baxter, Goal Atlas Ltd. In my recent analysis of the published strategies of 52 UK universities (University Strategy 2020), I discovered that almost 63% of university strategies have end dates in 2019, 2020 or 2021 and hence will need to be re-written…

I have a niece who is studying ethics as part of one of her GCSEs. Whenever I see her, she asks me to pose difficult ethical issues for us to debate. So we chew the fat over what moral code should be built in to the design of autonomous vehicles,…

A guest blog kindly contributed by Dr Rebekah Smith McGloin, Director at the Doctoral College and Centre for Research Capability and Development, Coventry University. Global Challenge Research broadly describes research projects that align with the UN sustainable development goals. It benefits one or more developing countries and is carried out in partnership…

HESA has completed its first round of the Graduate Outcomes survey, the new survey of graduates fifteen months post-graduation, which replaced the DLHE survey, which was only six months post-graduation. This is the first stage in running the new survey, which is the biggest annual social survey in the UK…

A guest blog kindly contributed by Bill Cooke, Professor of Strategic Management at the York Management School, University of York.  A blog I wrote before the 2014 REF (Research Excellence Framework) had over 10000 downloads from various platforms. In policy terms it was an abject failure – It was called…

This is a guest blog kindly contributed by Mike Grey, Head of University Partnerships at Gradconsult. I spent a decade designing, delivering and managing placement programmes. I still believe they are the single most potent weapon in what has become an employability arms race, and when successful can have a huge…