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The UK's only independent think tank devoted to higher education.

Blog

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].

  • The Robbins Report – a political bombshell By Professor Nick Barr

    16 October 2023 by Professor Nicholas Barr

    Perhaps it was because Lionel Robbins was a pillar of the establishment (LSE professor, Life Peer, Chairman of the Financial Times, Director of the Royal Opera House), that the 1963 Robbins Report on higher education landed like a bombshell. Its fundamental position (subsequently known as the ‘Robbins Principle’) was set…

  • A week is a long time in politics – a day in higher education can seem even longer

    12 October 2023 by Amanda Broderick

    On 12 September, the Office for Students (OfS) published its first set of findings from assessment visits focused on the quality of Business and Management courses. In conjunction with the announcements, HEPI ran a blog by Professor David Phoenix, Vice-Chancellor of London South Bank University (one of the institutions visited…

  • How can we utilise AI in higher education?

    11 October 2023 by Peter Haynes

    This autumn will see a strong government focus on artificial intelligence (AI) with the UK hosting the inaugural AI safety summit in November. In education, generative AI tools have both excited and alarmed the world over the past year, with tools like ChatGPT reportedly reaching over 100 million users within…

  • Do area-based measures have a place in widening participation activity?

    10 October 2023 by Tej Nathwani and Jenny Stinchcombe

    The merits of area and individual-based indicators in widening participation work continue to be keenly debated, including on the HEPI website (for example, in this piece by Sasha Roseneil). In this blog, we illustrate that it is those living in the most deprived areas that are least likely to be…

  • 24-Hour Party People Carnt Smile*

    9 October 2023 by Nick Hillman

    It was a brief one-day visit for me this year to the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool, but I was there long enough to sense that there was a new mood afoot: the crazy Judean People’s Front leafleteers that used to congregate along the Brighton seafront were less numerous (albeit…

  • The Big Bookshare

    6 October 2023 by Victoria Barnett, Sebastian Groes and Peter Harvey

    This autumn, the Arts Council England funded Big Bookshare project at the University of Wolverhampton will invite hundreds of prisoners to join a book club and take part in a series of activities including creative writing workshops. The project is based on close engagement with prisoners themselves, but also on…

  • Skills, skills and degree apprenticeships – a review of Conservative Party Conference

    6 October 2023 by Josh Freeman

    There were only 22,060 degree apprentice starts in 2022/23 (of 560,000 students accepted through UCAS overall) – but if the 2023 Conservative Party Conference was your first foray into higher education, you wouldn’t know it. This was #CPC23, my first Tory Conference and a wonderfully hectic tour in search of…

  • Let’s get strategic

    5 October 2023 by Susanna Kalitowski

    If you ask any UK Vice Chancellor what’s keeping them awake at night, it’s highly likely to be the financial sustainability of their institution and the wider sector. Years of frozen funding coupled with rising costs are inevitably taking their toll across all four nations. University leaders are also increasingly…