This piece has been written for HEPI by Josh Freeman, who is a postgraduate student and a former HEPI intern. His most recent publication was on students’ perceptions of career services (HEPI Policy Note 40). Unexpectedly for a piece of legislation whose passage through Parliament has been painfully slow, December 2022 saw a rapid series of changes made to the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill.  First, the Government appeared to make large changes to the new statutory tort, a new legal mechanism intended to support those who have had their free speech rights infring ..read more

Today’s HEPI blog is the text of a speech by Nick Hillman, Director of HEPI, to a joint meeting of the Senate and Council at Lancaster University. It is a great pleasure to be back at Lancaster University. I have visited many times before of course, perhaps most notably for a debate hosted by some of your students in which I defended the current tuition fee system against the (then) Labour politician Chris Williamson. My side of the debate went down to a crushing defeat, but the event was followed by further (good-natured) argument in a local pub, showing lively student-promoted free ..read more

This review of A Revolution Betrayed by Peter Hitchens has been kindly written for HEPI by Nick Bryars, who has taught in two different grammar schools and is currently Head of Economics and Business at a grammar school in Stratford. Last Friday, HEPI published an alternative review of the same book here, to which Peter Hitchens responded over the weekend here. This is an important new book on the history of grammar schools. Peter Hitchens brings a fresh perspective to a debate which has enraged voices on the left and the right at least since the original Circular 10/65, which began the proc ..read more

This blog has been kindly contributed by Liz Allen, Director of Strategic Initiatives, F1000, and Victoria Gardner, Director of Policy, Taylor & Francis. We will be discussing the Policy Note at a webinar on Tuesday, 31 January. Find out more and sign up here.  HEPI and Taylor & Francis have been exploring the theme of open access and research impact over the past year, informed by inputs from a range of experts and culminating in publication of a Policy Note at the end of 2022, Why open access is not enough: Spreading the benefits of research (HEPI Policy Note 42). The Policy N ..read more

This blog has been kindly contributed by Liz Allen, Director of Strategic Initiatives, F1000, and Victoria Gardner, Director of Policy, Taylor & Francis. We will be discussing the Policy Note at a webinar on Tuesday, 31 January. Find out more and sign up here.  HEPI and Taylor & Francis have been exploring the theme of open access and research impact over the past year, informed by inputs from a range of experts and culminating in publication of a Policy Note at the end of 2022, Why open access is not enough: Spreading the benefits of research (HEPI Policy Note 42). The Policy N ..read more

Review of Peter Hitchens’s new book ‘A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System’ by Paul Ashwin, Professor of Higher Education, Head of Department and Deputy Director of the Centre for Global Higher Education, Lancaster University. Next week, HEPI will be running a second review of the same book by a grammar school teacher that takes a different perspective on the arguments.  ‘Comprehensive Britain’ has laid waste to our once great universities, fuelled rampant grade inflation, and destroyed, perhaps forever, educational excellence and rigour. It d ..read more

This blog has been kindly written for HEPI by Professor David Phoenix, Vice-Chancellor of London South Bank University (LSBU) and CEO of LSBU Group. You would be hard pressed to find someone in either the higher education sector or Westminster willing to argue that the current funding system for universities is working well. The value of outstanding loans reached £182 billion in March last year. (By comparison, the current estimated cost of the entire Covid-19 vaccine rollout is £11.7 billion). At the same time, the unit-of-resource for teaching students is rapidly shrinking, wi ..read more

Today at 6pm is the main UCAS deadline for entry to higher education in 2023. UCAS recently blogged for HEPI on the changes they are proposing to make to higher education applications in future. Here, Sarra Jenkins, a Politics teacher in Loughborough who is behind the successful @LGS_Politics twitter account, responds to UCAS’s proposals by looking at what they might mean for those on the cusp of higher education. The successful completion of a UCAS application for a Year 13 student is a real moment of celebration. It is often pre-dated by weeks or months of focus on the applicatio ..read more

This blog was kindly contributed by Philip Carpenter, Pro-Chancellor at the University of York and an Advisory Board Director of Kortext. Philip offers some reflections on the recent HEPI and Taylor & Francis Policy Note, Why open access is not enough: Spreading the benefits of research. HEPI and Taylor & Francis are hosting a free webinar on the issues in the Policy Note next week, on Tuesday, 31 January 2023 – sign up here. Driving once between the Oxford and Chichester offices of the publisher John Wiley, I was passed by a plumber’s white van, emblazoned on the side with ..read more

This HEPI blog has been kindly written for HEPI by Natalie Day, Johnny Rich and Professor Sir Chris Husbands. Writing for HEPI in December, Mary Curnock Cook and Malcolm Grant argued that the ways in which the Office for Students applies QAA methodology to new entrants to HE prevents the emergence of different forms of higher education provision. As a result, the vision of a more diverse higher education system which lay at the heart of Jo Johnson’s Higher Education and Research Act (2017) was not materialising. A different approach to assessing new providers, they argued, might unlo ..read more