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From analysis of national policies and institutional practice across Europe, this Eurydice Brief shows that:

• Few countries have developed policy initiatives, strategies, targets and measures for improving access for people from groups currently under-represented in higher education.
• Systems to monitor the social characteristics of students could be improved, and data linked to concrete policy purposes - such as improving access and reducing dropout for disadvantaged students.
• The widening participation agenda is not yet followed through by governments and higher education institutions as a coherent policy approach involving access, retention and employability.

The Brief draws on key findings from the report, Modernisation of Higher Education in Europe: Access, retention and employability, and covers higher education systems in 34 European countries.
The modernisation agenda (European Commission 2011) supports higher education systems in Europe in responding to the needs of our increasingly knowledge-based economy and societies. To expand the knowledge base and foster progress, an increasing number of European citizens require high level knowledge and competences. Supporting the development of quality mass higher education systems is therefore high on policy agendas at both national and European levels. Download "Modernisation of Higher Education in Europe: Access, Retention and Employability".

On 25 March 2015, the report The Importance of Advanced Physical and Mathematical Sciences to the Australian Economy was released.
To read or print the report, click here.
An infographic of key report findings is available here.
A joint media release by Professor Chubb and The Academy of Science can be read here.
The report was commissioned by the Office of the Chief Scientist and the Australian Academy of Science and produced by the Centre for International Economics (CIE).
The report combines the expertise of Australia’s scientific community with that of business and industry. The aim has been to produce an economic framework that can use the available statistics and economic modelling techniques to provide a timely reminder of how much of our national economic activity depends on the advanced physical and mathematical sciences (the APM sciences). The APM sciences comprise physics, chemistry, the earth sciences and the mathematical sciences, where ‘advanced’ means science undertaken and applied in the past 20 years. Biology and the life sciences were not covered in the report.
The direct contribution of the APM sciences is estimated to be 11% (or about $145 billion per year of the Australian economy). The contribution in additional and flow-on benefits equals another 11%, bringing the total benefits to 22% or around $292 billion per year. More...

IAP - the global network of science academies - which comprises 107 science academies from both developed and developing countries, today announces the publication on its website of Working with Big Ideas of Science Education.
This publication is the work of an international expert group of scientists, engineers and science educators, and follows the earlier publication (in 2010) by the same group of Principles and Big Ideas of Science Education.
Working with Big Ideas of Science Education addresses concerns that the science curriculum in many countries is overloaded and over-detailed, frequently accompanied by assessment that requires memorising multiple facts, and a deterrent to the widely advocated inquiry-based approach to teaching and learning. The book provides a reasoned response to this situation by expressing the goals of science education in terms of a relatively small number of powerful ideas – called ‘big ideas’ because they explain a range of related phenomena and events. It sets out big ideas of science and about science in the form of narrative descriptions of progression in building an understanding of key ideas across the years from the start of primary to the end of secondary school. More...