Blog

This guest blog has been kindly written for HEPI by Gervas Huxley of Bristol University and Mike Peacey  of the New College of the Humanities. Parents of undergraduates frequently express surprise at how little time their children spend in lectures and classes. On open days it is common for both pupils and their parents to ask for information on contact hours. It was concerns of this kind that led us to use the Freedom…

Before Christmas, I tweeted that anyone who wants to write for HEPI should get in touch. >Have you got strong views on higher education?>Can you write in plain English?>Do you want to have an impact on policymakers? By the end of 2018, we will have published more papers than in…

This guest blog has been kindly contributed by Dean Machin, who is the Strategic Policy Adviser at the University of Portsmouth. In 2015, he wrote a report for the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission on data-sharing entitled ‘Data and public policy: trying to make social progress blindfolded’. Tomorrow, UCAS…

Last week, the first look at the annual data collected on staff at UK universities was published by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA). As well as the usual information on the profile of staff, new statistics are available on staff who are on zero-hour contracts and those who are hourly-paid,…

Over the past week, HEPI has been at the centre of a social media storm about academic selection. Last week, we published a report in our Occasional Paper series which looked at the question of how different school types fare in access to higher education, especially selective higher education, including…

A guest blog kindly contributed by Peter Ainsworth, Managing Director of Equimatrix, and author of Universities Challenged: Funding Higher Education through a Free-Market ‘Graduate Tax’ published by the Institute of Economic Affairs. 2019 appears set to be a defining year for the Higher Education sector. After years of plenty following…

A guest blog kindly contributed by Dennis Sherwood, who runs the Silver Bullet Machine consultancy. Last August, 811,776 A level and 5,470,076 GCSE grades were awarded to candidates in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. What happened next was sometimes jubilation (“B in history! Fantastic! I’m in!”); sometimes despair (a 3 in GCSE maths can close many doors).…

Like many people, I feel conflicted about grammar schools. I live in a part of the country where they are a mainstream part of the school system. The minority of local children who pass the 11+ have high chances of thriving at one of our three local(ish) grammar schools, but…

This book review has been kindly written for HEPI by Anand Shukla, Chief Executive of the online mentoring charity Brightside The importance of social mobility is a rare area of policy consensus between the main UK political parties. Given the decline of intergenerational social mobility in the last 50 years, it…