The Public Accounts Committee hearing this afternoon on alternative providers of higher education was a bruising affair. Margaret Hodge was in the Chair and she and her cross-party members ferociously grilled the witnesses from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the Student Loans Company, the Higher Education Funding Council…
We are grateful to Rob Behrens, the Independent Adjudicator for higher education, for contributing this exclusive guest blog on the new good practice framework for handling complaints and appeals – which is to be published at 9am on 12th December 2014. There has been an overwhelmingly positive reaction to the news…
There are strong rumours that the Chancellor will announce a new system of postgraduate loans in his autumn statement today. This would tackle some access problems by making finance less of a barrier. It’s not clear if George Osborne will announce a fully worked-out scheme or (probably more likely) promise to consult on the details.…
The National Audit Office have today published the Investigation into financial support for students at alternative higher education providers. It is interesting and timely.* It includes challenges for BIS, HE regulators and alternative providers. And it contains some useful new evidence, including examples of the adverts used to entice people on to courses.…
In this guest blog, Ruth Thompson, co-chair of the Higher Education Commission’s recent inquiry into financial sustainability (and a member of the Hepi Advisory Board), discusses the group’s recent work. On 24 November the Higher Education Commission launched the report of its latest inquiry, into the financial sustainability of English HE.…
Ten days ago, the Government’s response to the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee’s report on Student Loans was published. It received some press coverage at the time, for example from Times Higher Education, the BBC and the Guardian. They all rightly focussed on the Government’s refusal to accept Recommendation 11, which called ‘for an urgent…
The Director of Hepi, Nick Hillman, discusses some of the issues around postgraduate funding that are under discussion in the Treasury. As the UK’s only specialist think tank on higher education, Hepi keeps a close eye on the higher education work undertaken by the generalist think tanks of the left…
On Tuesday, 4th November 2014, the Director of HEPI, Nick Hillman, took part in a panel discussion at the Nuffield Foundation on recent higher education research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. An extract from his remarks is below. Thank you for inviting me. I head up the Higher Education…
In this blog post, the Director of HEPI, Nick Hillman, takes a first look at some new proposals on student funding from the Institute of Economic Affairs. On 23rd October, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) published Universities Challenged: Funding Higher Education through a Free-Market ‘Graduate Tax’ by Peter Ainsworth. It’s good to…
With today’s publication of his HEPI Occasional Paper, Martyn Harrow, the Chief Executive of Jisc, makes the case for universities continuing to share the costs of joint investment in technology infrastructure. The last few years have not been easy for UK universities. They have had to deal simultaneously with policy…