Recent governments have put their weight behind a variety of policies to improve access to higher education for school-leavers from disadvantaged backgrounds. The removal of student number controls, increased availability of bursaries and support, and targeted information campaigns mean these students are now more likely to enter higher education in England than ever before. More...
Data, it turns out, are the weakest link, and much of the meaningful information available has to be drawn from multiple sector organisations. In order to define widening access and to ensure any actions to make access to education more equitable and fairer have impact, CoWA made robust recommendations about tracking learners from early years and about how data is collected, shared, analysed and published. The Commission’s final report is clear, concise and worth reading. More...
In Wales, it is also a matter of marrying equity with excellence, and of engaging with our traditions in order to break predestined privileges and deliver better access to the professions, to academia and to individual and national prosperity. More...
According to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, ‘capital’ is not just an economic concept. He also saw an individual’s knowledge and tastes as a form of cultural capital, which is ‘institutionalized in the form of educational qualifications’. Bourdieu believed different levels of access to various forms of capital are the root causes of social inequality, something perhaps magnified in higher education. More...
In research just published in the journal Fiscal Studies, we examine teaching at UK universities in more detail than any study since the 1963 Robbins Report. We compared the teaching of Economics, History and Physics across 67 universities. More...
I’m feeling conflicted. Obviously this article is being published after internal consultation at Kingston University, but I am nevertheless aware that I’m in danger of revealing a significant Kingston USP, and one that correlates with a marked reduction in our institutional drop-out rate over the past two years; a big thing in today’s highly competitive higher education market. More...
A new HEPI report Going for Gold: Lessons from the TEF provider submissions by Diana Beech, HEPI Director of Policy & Advocacy, provides the first detailed analysis of the information submitted by universities for the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). More...
The publication, HEPI Occasional Paper (18) The Positive and Mindful University, proposes a number of ways to tackle the growing problem of mental health issues among students and also staff. More...
This is a speech that Nick Hillman, the Director of the Higher Education Policy Institute made this afternoon to an academic conference in central London. More...
The UK’s pipeline of creative talent is fracturing because Art, Media and Design are being downgraded in schools, according to a new report – A crisis in the creative arts in the UK? – from the Higher Education Policy Institute by Professor John Last, Vice-Chancellor of Norwich University of the Arts (NUA). More...
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