It was a busy news day on the 25th of July, with Boris Johnson’s new cabinet just announced so you may have missed discussion of our latest Policy Note: What do students think of contextual admissions?
Based on a survey of 1,035 students conducted by Youthsight, it was the first serious attempt to gather student views on the topic. More...
Whatever one may think of the Augar report and its varied recommendations, it appears to have focused generally on the right questions and to have appropriately considered existing research and evidence. More...
At this time of year, we tend to take stock at HEPI. Not only does the end of July mark the end of our financial year, but many students have now left their campuses for the summer, graduands are becoming graduates, academic staff are hoping (finally) to make faster progress on their research and other staff are gearing up for the 2019 admissions round – while the precariat are often still searching for their next opportunity position. More...
As someone with experience with independent reviews of higher education, I understand the energy and effort that panel members and officials put into such exercises. MillionPlus as a mission group inputted constructively into the Augar review process, submitting three tranches of written evidence. More...
Students will be given more than 1.5 million wrong GCSE, AS and A level grades this summer. Here are some potential solutions. Which do you prefer?
The results of this year’s school exams will be announced in a few weeks’ time. But as recently reported in the TES, Times and Telegraph, different examiners can legitimately give the same script different marks. As a consequence, of the more than 6 million grades to be awarded this August, over 1.5 million – that’s about 1 in 4 – will be wrong. But no one knows which specific grades, and to which specific candidates; nor does the appeals process right these wrongs. To me, this is a ‘bad thing’. I believe that all grades should be fully reliable. More...
“I can call up 50 academics who will tell me how to design the perfect pension system, but I can’t find any who can tell me how to improve the one we have now.” – New Labour minister
Like all such statements, the words aren’t literally true, yet successfully convey an important message. There is too often a disconnect between the language spoken by academics and that spoken by policy makers, a disconnect which can make it harder for the world-class research taking place in our universities to influence policy. More...
It is not beyond the realms of possibility that there will be a general election before the year is out – perhaps as early as September. I once thought a second referendum was more likely than a general election but, at this moment, it seems I was almost certainly wrong. More...
Beyond the headline announcements of the Augar Review, there are wide-ranging proposals, covering everything from Level 2 to adult education. Its recommendations regarding the promotion and expansion of Level 4 and 5 education demand particular attention, and I am pleased to see several recommendations I sought in my paper for HEPI last year (Filling in the Biggest Skills Gap). More...
We now have a new Prime Minister. I have written before about what Boris Johnson thinks of higher education. But his first impact on higher education will be the formation of his government. More...
As the dust begins to settle after a historic reshuffle, we take a look at the new Cabinet and their higher education backgrounds. Our initial analysis reveals:
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