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].
Sometimes it seems as though the debates on open access (OA) move in endless circles. In fact they are slowly spiraling towards their conclusion, just as OA policies are moving, albeit circuitously, towards full implementation. The policy trajectory has not been straight because so many technical, commercial and cultural arguments…
Oh, the grand old Duke of York He had ten thousand men He marched them up to the top of the hill And he marched them down again The Renters Reform Bill was part way through the House of Lords when the General Election was announced on 22nd May 2024…
Last month’s invitation-only meeting focused on assessment, with four HE leaders – from the University of Greenwich, Imperial College London, University of Glasgow and Queen’s University Belfast – sharing their institutional frameworks and practical solutions. Together, they took us through the cycle of assessment from the grassroots of assessment design…
In many countries, most research undertaken in universities is government funded and governments have a responsibility to ensure that it is well spent. This increasingly means that funding must be targeted at research quality. One of the means of knowing where quality research is undertaken is through rigorous and systematic…
UK universities have been a consistent target of choice by cyber-attackers in recent years. They are a particularly vulnerable institution due to the large number of students and staff dispersed across campuses, making it difficult for small IT teams to track the thousands of endpoints that each have pathways into…
The Student Academic Experience Survey comes of age Back at base, we tend to think of the HEPI / Advance HE Student Academic Experience Survey (or SAES) as a flagship piece of output. Produced annually and originally the brainchild of HEPI’s President and founder, Bahram Bekhradnia, it is now in its eighteenth…
In 1893, for the first time in modern democratic history, women voted in the national elections in New Zealand.[1] 131 years ago this was a model for equality in the political arena. Yet the arc of history does not always bend towards justice. In the heart of Asia in a country…
***The Green Party’s 2024 manifesto is due to be released today – follow the announcements for higher education on our live blog*** When people from elsewhere in the world think about the economic engine of the UK, their minds naturally turn to London. As the capital and largest city, London…
Regulation in England In England, the main regulator of higher education institutions became the Office for Students in 2018. From 2012 onwards, the majority of teaching income for home students had shifted from grant funding from the old Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and towards higher tuition fee…
Whatever your opinion of the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF), it has driven important changes in how we define and assess research excellence. The inclusion in the REF of societal impact, its emphasis on quality over quantity, and plans to evaluate the quality and sustainability of the research environment all…