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3 days ago | 
wonkhe.com | Elena Riva |David Kernohan |Mark Leach
Higher education institutions are increasingly acknowledging the importance of wellbeing in shaping meaningful and sustainable learning experiences. However, the wellbeing of students and staff is often treated as a separate or secondary issue, addressed through isolated initiatives rather than embedded into the fabric of university life. I propose adopting a lifelong approach to wellbeing in education grounded in appreciating that schools and universities are not distinct spheres.
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4 days ago | 
wonkhe.com | Charlie Jeffery |David Kernohan |Mark Leach
Universities once again find themselves in the crosshairs of a political argument around migration.
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4 days ago | 
wonkhe.com | David Kernohan |Mark Leach
The UK needs a plan for growth and innovation – an industrial strategy is a way of picking winners in terms of sector investments and prioritisation. Today’s iteration (the fourth in recent times, with Theresa May’s government providing the previous one) chooses eight high-potential sectors to prioritise funding and skills interventions, with the overall intention of encouraging private investment over the long term.
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5 days ago | 
wonkhe.com | Richard Harrison |David Kernohan |Mark Leach
A decade since his passing, work remains a touchpoint of UK higher education analysis. This reflects the depth and acuity of his analysis, but also his ability as a phrasemaker. One of his phrases that has stood the test of time is the “quality wars” – his label for the convulsions in UK higher education in the 1990s and early 2000s over the assurance of academic quality and standards. Watson coined this phrase in 2006, shortly after the 2001 settlement that brought the quality wars to an end.
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5 days ago | 
wonkhe.com | David Kernohan |Mark Leach
If you believe – as many do – that English higher education is among the best in the world, it can come as an unwelcome surprise to learn that in many ways it is not. As a nation that likes to promote the idea that our universities are globally excellent, it feels very odd to realise that the rest of the world is doing things rather better when it comes to quality assurance.
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1 week ago | 
wonkhe.com | Paul Martin |David Kernohan |Mark Leach
If you haven’t looked recently at the stats on the different rates of HE participation by ethnicity, you may find them quite striking. Today, young people from ethnic minority backgrounds are progressing to university in record numbers.
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4 weeks ago | 
wonkhe.com | David Kernohan |Mark Leach
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has, perhaps, been the greatest beneficiary of the Department for Education’s decade-long experiment with Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) data. It conducted the first analysis, and has been the most prominent user of this dataset ever since.
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1 month ago | 
wonkhe.com | Katharine Hubbard |David Kernohan |Mark Leach
One of the major trends in UK higher education is the increasing number of postgraduate students. There are now as many postgraduate taught students graduating every year as there are undergraduates. However, the equity of postgraduate experience and outcomes is almost completely overlooked. Modern postgraduatesThe postgraduate population is large and increasingly diverse. Approximately 450,000 students complete a postgraduate qualification in UK higher education institutions every year.
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1 month ago | 
wonkhe.com | Peter Sutoris |David Kernohan |Mark Leach
It’s natural that universities would contract. It is simply a market correctionAt least, that’s what a colleague recently said to me, referencing the earlier period of—some would say unfounded—growth in the UK’s higher education sector. But what we’re seeing now is not a neutral rebalancing of the books. It feels like a dismantling of the humanities, a retreat from the very fields of knowledge that hold the keys to our collective future.
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1 month ago | 
wonkhe.com | David Kernohan |Mark Leach
There’s not many in the higher education sector that would have welcomed any part of the recent immigration white paper. The reduction in the graduate route time limit would have been difficult enough. The BCA changes to duties on providers in order to sponsor international students will cause many problems. The possibility of financial penalties linked to asylum claims for those on student visas was as unexpected as it is problematic.
