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1 week ago | 
wonkhe.com | Livia Scott |Jim Dickinson |Mark Leach |Debbie McVitty
Institutions spend a lot of time surveying students for their feedback on their learning experience, but once you have crunched the numbers the hard bit is working out the “why.”The qualitative information institutions collect is a goldmine of insight about the sentiments and specific experiences that are driving the headline feedback numbers. When students are especially positive, it helps to know why, to spread that good practice and apply it in different learning contexts.
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1 week ago | 
wonkhe.com | Debbie McVitty |Mark Leach
The sector’s financial challenges have shone a spotlight on governance effectiveness in higher education in England.
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Mar 17, 2025 | 
wonkhe.com | Mark Peace |Mark Leach |Debbie McVitty
It started, as so many great conversations do, over coffee. On a chilly January day as we swapped tales of small children and shared cultural touchstones, we found ourselves riffing on the Trolls movie (which it turns out we have both seen a painful number of times). In particular, we found ourselves in Borgentown: a drab, grey world of monotony and drudgery, where fleeting joy depends on eating the vibrant, music-loving Trolls.
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Mar 16, 2025 | 
wonkhe.com | Debbie McVitty |Mark Leach
The pervasive sense that five years or a decade or 20 years hence the sector will look radically different might be an exciting topic for panel discussions but it’s not clear whether radical transformation is desirable – not least because the form that transformation might take remains far from clear.
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Jan 26, 2025 | 
wonkhe.com | Debbie McVitty |Mark Leach
Depending on how you look at it, mergers are either very common or very unusual in UK higher education. Dig deep enough into the annals of any institutional history and you will most likely find at some point that the institution as we know it today emerged from the combination or absorption of various nineteenth or twentieth-century mechanics institutes, colleges of teaching or technical colleges.
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Jan 19, 2025 | 
wonkhe.com | Debbie McVitty |Mark Leach
Universities have a critical role to play at the intersection of academic thought, organisational practice, and social benefits of technology. It’s easy when thinking about universities’ digital strategies to see that as a technical question of organisational capability and solutions rather than one part of the wider public role universities have in leading thinking and shaping practice for the benefit of society.
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Nov 17, 2024 | 
wonkhe.com | Debbie McVitty |Mark Leach
There was plenty of nuance in the debate and discussion about higher education finances at last week’s Festival of Higher Education but broadly those who said things publicly and bent my ear behind the scenes divided into two perspectives on how the next few years are likely to look.
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Nov 12, 2024 | 
wonkhe.com | Debbie McVitty |Mark Leach
Ask any higher education institution leader about the organisational challenges they’re grappling with, and they’ll start talking about silos. It makes sense to divide a large organisation like a university into parts – each unit with its own distinctive expertise, community of peers, and leadership. Historically for the execution of effective teaching and research, what was mostly needed was a group of academics working in a similar subject area.
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Oct 27, 2024 | 
wonkhe.com | Mark Leach |Debbie McVitty |Rachel MacSween
The new government is reviewing the UK’s international education strategy. Universities UK in its recently-published blueprint for Labour’s HE policy has called for a wide-ranging global higher education strategy to take its place.
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Sep 29, 2024 | 
wonkhe.com | Debbie McVitty |Mark Leach
Let’s start by acknowledging the scale of the ambition. Last autumn, as university finances continued to worsen, and Labour’s chances of winning the forthcoming General Election continued to improve, talk turned to the prospect of a “major review” of higher education in the next Parliament.
