Final Report of the IAU HEEFA Workshop in Kenya
The Final Report of the IAU Collaborative Workshop: A three-step activity to envision higher education for EFA locally, held in Nairobi, Kenya is now available. Organised in collaboration with the University of Nairobi, the Workshop brought together 30 participants from the University of Nairobi and Kenyatta University, both Ministries of Education and Higher Education and civil society who examined how to reinforce higher education’s contribution for EFA in Kenya. This Final Report was validated by the participants.
You can read the recommendations made; the results from the discussion groups on how research, teaching and community service can better contribute to achieving EFA in Kenya; the presentations; and learn who the participants were. For more information about IAU’s work in advancing higher education for EFA, click here.
IAU plans to conduct 4 Workshops in 2013 and 2014. See the Call for Hosting a Workshop. Deadline for applications: 30 April 2013. Contact: Nadja Kymlicka.

The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) will allocate £4.47 billion to 129 universities and higher education colleges and 203 further education colleges for the academic year 2013-14.
This funding is allocated for the following key areas and activities:
    £2.3 billion for teaching
    £1.6 billion for research
    £160 million for knowledge exchange
    £280 million in capital grants
    £149 million in special funding.
Further details are given in ‘Recurrent grants and student number controls for 2013-14’ (HEFCE 2013/05).
HEFCE’s priorities for funding
HEFCE will continue to invest on behalf of students and the wider public to promote opportunity, choice and excellence in higher education. Our funding supports quality and diversity in learning and teaching, widening participation and student retention, and world-leading research and knowledge exchange activity. We remain committed to the Government’s reforms, ensuring a smooth transition to the new funding arrangements, and implementing them in a way that makes sense for students and the wider higher education community. Read more...

Unistats has received over three million page views since launch. Since its launch on the 27 September 2012 to the 20 March, the Unistats web-site has received 3,315,620 page views and 171,186 unique visitors – an average of 984 new visitors per day.
The latest detailed statistics for the site are available below.
Unistats provides up-to-date, comparable and independent data and information for all UK higher education undergraduate courses, and is designed to support prospective students through the decision-making process of which course to study.
Higher education institutions, further education collegse or schools who would like access to materials to help promote the Unistats web-site to prospective students, their parents and/or advisers, can use the communications toolkit. These data show usage figures from the launch of the site on 27 September 2012 to 20 March 2013. Further reports will be published every three months.

By Barbara Ischinger, Director, OECD Directorate for Education. Education is one OECD department that has embraced the information revolution.
While we still use traditional means of getting our messages out to decision makers–through printed press releases, launch events and videos, for example– we recognise that there has been a huge shift in how individuals get their information. Social media technologies have now extended our outreach beyond policymakers to civil society. We have embraced new technologies to create more ways of gaining access to our great wealth of data and analysis. Read more...

More than four years after the onset of the economic and social crisis, there are five million fewer people in work in the 27 European Union Member States. Eurofound’s second annual European Jobs Monitor report ‘Employment polarisation and job quality in the crisis’ finds that the destruction of employment during the crisis has been sharpest in mid-paying jobs, while sparing in large part jobs at either end of the wage distribution. Higher paid jobs in service sectors in particular have proved most resilient.
New well-paid employment has come primarily in knowledge-intensive service sectors, such as ICT, business consultancy, health and education. During the peak period of the recession (2008–2009), employment growth in well-paid jobs was concentrated in predominantly publicly funded service sectors, principally health and education, but has shifted to private sector services more recently (2011-12). Some low-paid jobs have also increased employment – for example, cleaners and personal care workers in social work and residential care. In general, jobs in the lowest quintile have fared much better than those in the “shrinking middle”. The majority of construction and manufacturing jobs are near or just below median pay levels and these have suffered the brunt of employment losses. As these sectors are predominantly male, the aggregate impacts of the crisis have been very different for men and for women. Female job losses have been much more modest. Indeed, the recession can be seen as accelerating the catch-up process of women in the labour market, both in terms of employment numbers and access to higher layers of the employment structure. Women have increased their employment share, particularly in ‘mid-paid’ and ‘good’ jobs (those in the higher quintiles). In part, this has been because women are overrepresented in certain growing sectors such as health and underrepresented in declining sectors. But it also reflects higher levels of educational attainment by women at a time when qualifications are an even more important requisite for access to better quality jobs. An alarming illustration of the damage caused by the crisis to the prospects of younger, labour market entrants is that over the last year more of the net EU growth in well-paid, third-level graduate jobs was accounted for by those in the post-retirement age group (65+) than by workers under 30. Download the report here.

The Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA), a private nonprofit national association based in Washington, DC, seeks candidates for the position of Vice President for Recognition Services. A national voice for self-regulation of academic quality through accreditation, CHEA is an association of 3,000 degree-granting colleges and universities and recognizes 60 institutional and programmatic accrediting organizations.
Responsibilities: Reporting to the president of CHEA, the vice president is responsible for oversight and management of CHEA’s recognition policy and recognition process, a system of review and evaluation of institutional and programmatic accrediting organizations.  The vice president is responsible for providing information to CHEA constituents and the public with regard to CHEA recognition as well as generating national analyses and publications on accreditation and accrediting organizations. The vice president is part of a CHEA team, working with other CHEA staff to design and implement CHEA conferences and meetings as well as other organization-wide activities.
Qualifications: Candidates must possess significant experience in higher education or higher education-related settings; a working knowledge of accreditation or other quality assurance systems; skills in creating and managing projects and processes; demonstrated excellent interpersonal, written and oral communication skills, including experience in collecting, analyzing and presenting key data; demonstrated capacity to engage and work effectively with a diverse array of institutions, organizations and individuals and the ability to cooperate with other staff in a small organization to assure successful implementation of strategic priorities and adherence to organizational mission.
Applications: Review of applicant materials begins immediately and will continue until the position is filled. Information about CHEA and the CHEA Recognition Policy and Procedures is available on the CHEA website www.chea.org. Salary is commensurate with background and experience. Applicants should submit a letter of interest, resume, salary requirements, a short writing sample illustrating the requirements and qualifications noted above and three to five professional references with current contact information. One reference must be from a current or prior supervisor.
Please email applications to friis@chea.org or mail or fax to the address or fax number below. Only applications that include all the materials noted above will be considered. All inquiries and applications will be treated as confidential. Council for Higher Education Accreditation ♦ One Dupont Circle NW Suite 510 ♦ Washington, DC 20036
P (202) 955 6126 ♦ F (202) 955 6129 ♦ Email chea@chea.org.

On March 19, 2013, the U.S. Department of Education (USDE) issued a "Dear Colleague" letter providing guidance to higher education institutions on how competency-based programs can be approved for federal financial aid eligibility. As a condition of approval, an institution must demonstrate that its institutional accrediting organization has reviewed and approved the direct assessment program and agrees with the institution's assessment of its credit hour equivalencies. Articles about the letter appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed.
The letter, signed by David Bergeron, Acting Assistant Secretary for Postsecondary Education, notes that "The Department plans to collaborate with both accrediting agencies and the higher education community to encourage the use of this innovative approach when appropriate, to identify the most promising practices in this arena, and to gather information to inform future policy regarding competency-based education."
CHEA will follow this issue closely and will keep member institutions and recognized accrediting organizations informed on any developments.

The 6th International Barcelona Conference on Higher Education suggests discussing together around the most relevant, significant and inspiring issues for the advancement in the field of community-university engagement. Our proposal is to offer plenary, parallel sessions and workshops where to create new reflections, thoughts and visions on the field. Sessions will have together people that can bring theoretical reflections and examples of diverse good practices and initiatives, and there will be diversity of methodologies and approaches to enable participation and creativity to flourish.
Panel: "Learning to read reality"
We need to re-invent all systems that organize life: economic, political, environmental and social, to respond to new needs, overcoming the limitations and undesirable side effects of the models that we have used up to date. We should urgently and seriously consider the priorities in the generation and use of knowledge in our societies. What is at stake is the very concept of the idea of ​​progress. [more]
Building the world we imagine
This session will explore the vision of the world we want and deserve and its disconnection with the world that underpins teaching and research in HEIs today. The session will present fresh and innovative ideas and visions of students, practitioners and scholars with the aim to share everyone’s imagined world. Education has a big intergenerational responsibility in building the world we imagine. [more]
Why is engagement critical for social change?
Engagement is not just an idea, but a set of practical actions, which necessarily entail struggles for change and transformation that require altering the current social structures and power relations. [more]
Enlarging the conception of knowledge
In this session we will discuss what we understand by knowledge and its role in society, and how engagement contributes to make all cosmologies of knowledge count. [more]
Redefining structures and political frameworks for making engagement to happen
Adapting and creating appropriated structures at all levels is key for the mainstreaming of community-university engagement. The session will examine inspiring institutional design examples, the most relevant national policies, political frameworks and the role of networks, and how they have contributed to a scholar’s cultural change. [more]
Building partnership: making cooperation mainstream
Partnership is the central aspect in developing community engagement initiatives that deal with the issues of people. A partnership is a way of being and a way of working with others that implies mutual understanding, common good, reciprocity, collaboration in decision making and transparency regarding outcomes. [more]
Engagement with added value
This session is about quality assurance of engagement. The session will discuss the need of a system of indicators that measures the quality of engagement, and how it can be generated in ways that is consistent with the spirit of engagement and that engages all actors together. The session will also explore ways in which the system of indicators of engagement can be defined collectively and be introduced in the international agenda. [more]

Sur le blog de Michel Abhervé pour Alternatives économiques. Face à l’obligation de démission de Jérôme Cahuzac, un petit remaniement ministériel a été organisé, traduisant la hiérarchie implicite des ministères.
Bernard Cazeneuve, qui avait preuve d’une relle maîtrise du domaine complexe des affaires européennes, est promu au budget et remplacé dans cette responsabilité par Thierry Repentin, qui avait, en quelques mois, su maîtriser un domaine complexe avec lequel il n’était pas familier lors de sa prise de fonction, la formation professionnelle et l’apprentissage (voir Un ajustement ministériel).
Son poste de ministre délégué à la formation professionnelle et à l’apprentissage n’est pas pourvu, comme l’écrit, sobrement, le Journal Officiel “Il est mis fin aux fonctions de M. Thierry Repentin, ministre délégué auprès du ministre du travail, de l’emploi, de la formation professionnelle et du dialogue social, chargé de la formation professionnelle et de l’apprentissage“. En attendant, la charge de Michel Sapin va s’alourdir, alors qu’il va être beaucoup mobilisé ces prochaines semaines au Parlement pour le débat, qui s’annonce complexe, concernant la loi sur la sécurisation de l’emploi.
Le poste sera peut-être pourvu, en rattrapage, ces prochains jours, à moins qu’il ne disparaisse, comme cela été le cas entre lai et juin dernier. Mais il est indéniable que ce manque, provisoire ou pas, traduit l’importance toute relative accordée à ce secteur, ce qui surprend quand on se souvient que le président de la République venait d’affirmer, dans son discours de Blois, sa volonté de mettre la formation professionnelle au coeur de son action pour l’emploi, avec un objectif temporel relativement rapproché (voir Formation professionnelle: François Hollande s’est mis au défi).
Comme l’annonce Localtis, Thierry Repentin venait d’annoncer à l’occasion de la séance plénière du Conseil national pour la formation tout au long de la vie (CNFPTLV) le projet de loi sur la formation professionnelle pour l’hiver
Quant à l’apprentissage, nous venions juste de saluer une des priorités affirmées par Thierry Repentin (voir Le ministre veut développer l’apprentissage dans l’économie sociale).