The main currency of politics is killer facts: striking points that move a debate on. In higher education, current killer facts include the claim from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) that the poorest graduates in England leave university with debts of £57,000 and that interest on student loans has increased to 6.1%. More...

One of the Government’s stated aims in the current round of higher education reforms is to ‘make it easier to set up high-quality new universities to give students more choice’. For the most part, the focus of policy – and debate – has been on potential new entrants to the higher education sector. More...

University changed my life, just as it will change the lives of those school leavers who enrol for the first time this autumn. More...

Recently, someone asked me which HEPI reports had been most widely read. There is no perfect way to measure this because we send out the same number of hard copies of each report and it is up to the recipients to decide whether to read them or not. More...

Listed as an under-represented group in government guidance to the Director of Fair Access since 2011, care leavers are included in approximately 80 per cent of 2016/17 university access agreements. Yet while care leavers remain a target group according to the Office for Fair Access (OFFA) website, it is concerning that strategic guidance for developing 2018/19 Access Agreements does not identify them as a priority group. More...