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].
This guest blog has been kindly contributed by Anthony Seldon, Vice-Chancellor at the University of Buckingham. Universities in the UK have lost the country. If not the entire country, the elites at least have given up on us. Sometime, earlier this decade, their perception of us began to change from…
This is a guest blog kindly contributed by Adam Haxell, Senior Parliamentary Officer for MillionPlus, the Association for Modern Universities. Opinion on higher education policy is starkly divided across the political spectrum. What should be on offer, where, when and who pays for it – every position appears hotly contested.…
In this guest blog, the education journalist Alison Kershaw writes about what she has learnt about abolishing tuition fees during a stint in Chile – and what it could mean for plans to do the same back at home in England. In 2011, just months after students in England took…
A guest blog kindly contributed for University Mental Health Day by Graham Galbraith, Vice-Chancellor at the University of Portsmouth. When my generation reflects on our university days, we tend to think they were the best years of our lives. These days, with the media focus on poor student mental health, young…
A guest blog kindly contributed by Tim Blackman, Vice-Chancellor, Middlesex University Degree classification and inequalities in higher education are the focus of two recent Office for Students reports and regulations. Both these issues are informed by statistical analyses by the OfS that make much of ‘unexplained variation’. However, very different…
This guest blog from Dennis Sherwood marks the third in a series about grade reliability. “Have you read that blog about one grade in every four being wrong?” “Yes. I have. I had no idea that the results of school exams were so unreliable. And so variable by subject too…
There is a story on the front page of the Sunday Telegraph which says people with less than 3 Ds at A-Level won’t get funding to go to higher education. There is a clear precedent for this. Sir David Eccles, the Minister of Education, told the House of Commons in July 1960,…
This guest blog has been kindly written for HEPI by Andy Nicol, Managing Director at QS Enrolment Solutions The Augar review into post-18 education is set to have a profound impact on the funding of higher education in the UK. With knock-on effects on how students and prospective students make decisions about the value for money and return…
HEPI has recently hosted book reviews of Melissa Benn’s ‘Life Lessons: The Case for a National Education Service’ and of ‘Social Mobility and its Enemies’ by Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin. Here, Nick Hillman reviews a third important new book about education and social mobility: ‘Engines of Privilege: Britain’s Private School…
This guest blog has been kindly contributed by Dennis Sherwood, an independent consultant. In my HEPI blog of 15 January, I presented evidence to show about one school exam grade in every four, as awarded each August, is wrong. That matters. Life-changing judgements – university admissions (or not), apprenticeship places (or not), the need for a re-sit (or not) – are being…