By Valerie Stead. The appointment of Louise Richardson as vice-chancellor of The University of Oxford has been hailed as momentous and inspiring. As the first woman to hold the position in the history of Oxford University and one of few female vice-chancellors of higher education institutions in the UK, this was a remarkable and celebratory event. More...

By Mike Groves, Diana Hopkins and Tom Reid. Around 70 million people – including Bill Gates – have signed up for the language learning app Duolingo. The app has received plenty of media attention, and its creators claim that it can help anyone with a smart phone learn a new language. More...

By Sandra McNally. From this September, all pupils at secondary school will have to study English, a language, maths, science and history or geography at GCSE. This is the English Baccalaureate, or Ebacc, which education minister Nicky Morgan has insisted are core academic subjects that should be taken by all children. More...

By Jürgen Enders. The word “tenure” is usually associated in universities with job security and professional autonomy. It is a term familiar in North America, where the notion of a “job-for-life” for professors who achieve “tenure” has come under pressure in recent years, most recently in a legal case in Wisconsin. But across Europe there are a variety of different employment tracks through which academics can reach professor level.
I have had the pleasure of working as an academic in three European countries – Germany, The Netherlands, and the UK – each of which highlights some of the alternative options to the tenure-track model in the US. More...

By Roger King. The quality of teaching at universities has emerged as one of the key priorities for the new Conservative majority government. In a recent speech to Universities UK, Jo Johnson the new universities minister, said he wanted to see universities in England enhance teaching quality, bear down on grade inflation and achieve parity of esteem between teaching and research. More...

By David Mills and Patrick Alexander. Special government funding given to Oxford and Cambridge to help pay for the universities' undergraduate tutorial teaching system is coming to an end. Oxford will lose £4.2m and Cambridge £2.7m “institution-specific” funding from the Higher Education Funding Council, which is also used to help fund the universities' undergraduate interview process. More...

By Anna Childs. Between 2002 and 2013, approximately US$42.6 billion was given in foreign aid by the world’s richest countries to support higher education in developing countries. That may sound like a lot, but the total amount spent on foreign aid in that period was US$1.6 trillion – dwarfing higher education to just 2.7% of the total. More...

By Gill Wyness. There were a surprising number of announcements relating to higher education in George Osborne’s budget this week. One of the most controversial was the announcement that university maintenance grants for lower-income students in England and Wales are to be scrapped from September 2016 and replaced with loans. More...

By Tristan McCowan. For decades, development agencies have encouraged low and middle-income countries to focus their education spending on primary schools and basic vocational skills. They have considered that universities provide lower rates of return on public investment and benefit elites at the expense of the poor. More...

By Judith Evans. A controversial new trend in “sugar dating” has recently gained attention again. Sold as somewhere between a business relationship and dating, the practice involves young, attractive, predominantly female “sugar babies” – many of them students – exchanging their companionship for financial support from older, wealthy predominantly male “sugar daddies” or “mommies”. More...