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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].

  • ‘More work to do’: internal academic governance and governing body assurance

    4 October 2023 by Alex Bols

    Ongoing media headlines about ‘low quality’ or ‘rip-off’ university courses are just the latest in a series of headlines relating to quality and standards that go back over twenty years to talk of ‘Mickey Mouse’ degrees. The political expectation is often a regulatory intervention that can raise questions about the…

  • What role can research play in developing the skills base of the UK workforce?

    3 October 2023

    With skills given top billing in government initiatives from the Innovation Strategy to the Levelling Up White Paper, the question put to a recent HEPI roundtable dinner was an important one: how can we persuade policymakers to be more ambitious about research and scholarship in creating a highly skilled and…

  • Weekend Reading: TEF Results week – honestly, I quite enjoyed it!

    30 September 2023 by Rosie Scott-Ward

    Professionally, I have had the privilege to ‘grow up’ in a unique environment – a relatively small and specialist college offering Higher Education (HE), which five years ago gained University Title, having achieved Taught Degree Awarding Powers in 2017.  Over the 25+ years, I have seen a few higher education…

  • TEF scores gold overall, but categories require improvement

    29 September 2023 by Susanna Kalitowski

    University Alliance has long been something of a Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) superfan. For years it made no sense for our higher education system to have a REF to measure research quality but no TEF to assess excellence in teaching. The vast majority of students who experience higher education do…

  • Seven (very) early thoughts on today’s TEF results

    28 September 2023 by Nick Hillman

    England’s Office for Students has, this morning, published the latest Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) results for higher education institutions. Here, the HEPI Director, Nick Hillman, provides some very early thoughts on their importance.

  • TEF results: the challenges of evidencing Educational Gain

    28 September 2023 by Emily Pollinger

    Up and down the land in 2022, Word documents were opened, “Educational Gain” typed at the top, then the authors paused for a careful think. How to distil the purpose and value of higher education into this definition? How to differentiate our definition so that what makes our educational offering…

  • A toolkit for higher education

    27 September 2023 by Sarah Knight

    Today Jisc launches its digital transformation guide and toolkit which will support universities in assessing their digital maturity, planning their approach for and delivering digital transformation. For a more in-depth read on what has gone into producing this toolkit and what its aims are, Jisc’s Managing Director for HE and…

  • Taking a holistic, people-centred approach to digital transformation 

    25 September 2023 by Liam Earney

    Universities are at a critical time of change, balancing the need to innovate with the many challenges they face to delivering the world-class education for which our sector is known; tight budgets, staff juggling multiple responsibilities and students needing more support. At Jisc, we believe that digital innovation isn’t yet…