It took its time but finally the Augar Review has landed. And for the Further Education (FE) sector there is much to celebrate. The review is clear. Enough is enough. No more Cinderella sector. If the UK wants to resolve the skills element of its productivity conundrum then the FE sector needs to be rapidly recapitalised, its workforce upskilled, its status upgraded and the regulatory system rebooted in order to deal with, what Augar describes, as the ‘missing middle’ of level 4 and 5 technical qualifications. More...

I have never cheered out loud when reading a review of higher education funding before. But I did last week, when I came to a diagram on page 44 of the Augar Review of Post-18 Education and Funding. It shows how five different people might drop in and out of education as an adult, using a proposed lifelong learning loan allowance. More...

It would be a great pity if the bulk of the Augar review were to be rejected as a result of criticism of its headline recommendations on student fees, or completely lost in the general hubbub generated by the Conservative leadership race. While the concern expressed in the report about the paucity of learners qualified in higher technical qualifications is not new, the fact that the report has so much to say on this subject is to be welcomed. More...

Last week’s Augar report divided opinion. At HEPI, we were at the more positive end of the spectrum, not least because the report addressed, in a serious way, pretty much all the points we had said it should.
We were, and remain, determined not to fall down the biggest rabbit hole that has to be avoided when commenting sensibly on public policy: being unceasingly negative and refusing to recognise serious attempts to address genuine problems. More...

Today is the launch of the much awaited review into post-18 education and funding  – or the Augar review. It’s a 216 page report with a lot in it. You’ll have read about the proposed cut to student fees already, so I will leave that to other commentators. There is also a big unknown as to how far implementation of the fee cut would squeeze widening participation budgets – but that would rely on how far the treasury would actually follow through on the proposal to fully fund the lost income from lower fees. More...

How should we judge today’s report on the review of post-18 education and funding? Just over a year ago, HEPI published ten points-of-note that the post-18 review would have to get to grips with to fix the broken parts of our education and training system. Here’s how the review stacks up against them. More...

Despite the competing political stories around, the publication of the Augar review on post-18 education is already leading to acres of coverage and commentary.
At HEPI, we have published an initial response, judged the recommendations against our original submission to the review and looked specifically at the parts of the report that focus on widening participation. More...

The report that universities and colleges have all been waiting for has finally landed. The immediate focus will be on the proposed reduction in the undergraduate tuition fee cap. But, while important and of particular concern to smaller and specialist institutions, it is just one recommendation among many. The lower fee cap was leaked weeks ago and the recommendation is that the funding shortfall should be made up by taxpayers. So the income spent on each student may not necessarily change much – at least on average and to begin with – even if fees do come down. More...

A new Occasional Paper from the Higher Education Policy Institute reveals a big increase in the number of university staff accessing counselling and occupational health services. More...