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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 difference a year makes

    31 January 2022 by Diana Beech

    This guest blog has been kindly written by Dr Diana Beech, Chief Executive Officer of London Higher – the representative body for the UK’s largest regional higher education powerhouse in London. Diana was previously Policy Adviser to the last three Universities Ministers, and you can find her on Twitter at…

  • Will the Office for Students’ proposals bake in disadvantage?

    28 January 2022 by Joan O’ Mahony

    Dr Joan O’ Mahony is Director of Academic Development at Bloomsbury Institute London. Previously she was Senior Advisor (Teaching and Learning) at Advance HE, and before that the Academic Lead for Student Retention at the Higher Education Academy. The purpose of any policy consultation by a regulatory body is to…

  • Minimum Thresholds – Are we really protecting students?

    26 January 2022 by Sally Burtonshaw

    This guest blog has been kindly written by Sally Burtonshaw, Senior Policy and Advocacy Officer at London Higher – the representative body for the UK’s largest regional higher education powerhouse. You can find Sally on Twitter at @SallyBurtonshaw. As the dust begins to settle on the 699 pages of Office…

  • Learning from the Past: What can we learn from Polytechnics?

    25 January 2022 by Elena Wilson

    This blog was contributed by Elena Wilson, Policy Manager at the Edge Foundation. The lack of ‘policy memory’ amongst policy makers has become a key problem in English further (FE) and higher education (HE) policy making (Watson, 2011). The rapid churn in government, change in ministerial teams and the rotation…

  • Comeback CATE…

    24 January 2022 by John Cater

    This blog was contributed by Dr. John Cater, Vice-Chancellor of Edge Hill University and the immediate past Chair of the Universities UK/Guild HE Teacher Education Advisory Group.  He writes here in a personal capacity.     Few will remember CATE, the Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education. But history repeats…

  • Wine tasters, super crunchers and King Canute – what do they tell us about the new regulatory burdens from the Office for Students?

    21 January 2022 by Nick Hillman

    The flurry of important new documents from the Office for Students will be pored over for months, particularly between now and the end of the consultation period in March 2022. Most notably, the OfS wants to assess institutions on their students’ continuation, completion and progression rates. Institutions that fall below certain thresholds…

  • Foundation Years: a student’s perspective

    19 January 2022 by Oliver Price

    This blog was contributed by Oliver Price, a graduate of the University of Manchester and former Research & Editorial Assistant for the Engineering Professors’ Council. Here he discusses his experience as a Foundation Year student at the University of Manchester, where he eventually graduated with First-Class Honours in Chemical Engineering.…

  • Five common predictions about COVID and education that now appear to be wrong

    18 January 2022 by Nick Hillman

    No one would dispute that COVID-19 has severely disrupted the education of millions of people. Our polling with Advance HE, for example, shows an unprecedented proportion of undergraduate students think they have received ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’ value for money and twice as many as usual feel their experiences have been…