-
1 day ago | 
wonkhe.com | Jim Dickinson |Mark Leach
This year’s Eurovision host city is Basel in Switzerland (“tiny but shiny”), which is also home to the country’s biggest and best Fasnacht. Every year at the start of lent, the German-speaking regions hold a huge carnival with elaborate parades, artistic masks, and costumes, along with Guggenmusik – brass bands playing loud, off-beat music.
-
1 day ago | 
wonkhe.com | James Coe |Mark Leach
UKRI has a massive job. As the National Audit Office’s (NAO) new report sets out in 2023–24 UKRI assessed close to 29,000 grant funding applications and spent £6bn on innovation grants. It featured in 105 policy papers across 13 ministerial departments in the last three years alone, and it has been seven years since the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) formally set out UKRI’s role and objectives.
-
2 days ago | 
wonkhe.com | Jim Dickinson |Mark Leach
Gara (problem-solving abilities), Urra (wisdom and creativity), Raga (courage and resilience), Zargo (health and success) and Czarodoro (overcoming personal limitations). Oh, and Jarga (the cleansing of negative energies) and Jarun (karmic balance). No, it’s not Poland’s graduate attributes framework – it’s a set of new age “agmas” that Polish Eurovision entrant Justyna Steczkowska starts chanting in the final 30 seconds of her song “Gaja”.
-
3 days ago | 
wonkhe.com | Jim Dickinson |Mark Leach
I swear if I was Danish or Lithuanian or Greek or something I wouldn’t have this problem. But (no) thanks to the byzantine bureaucrats at the Brexit Broadcasting Corporation, I have somehow been rejected for media accreditation to cover the higher education aspects of the Eurovision Song Contest for the third year in a row.
-
1 week ago | 
wonkhe.com | Mark Leach
Hugh Jones Hugh Jones is a freelance HE consultant. You’ll find a daily #HigherEducationPostcard if you follow him on Bluesky Philip Augar – he of the review of higher education funding in England commissioned by Theresa May’s government – wrote a piece this morning in the Financial Times with an interesting snippet:Three quarters [of English higher education providers] are expected to be loss making by 2025-2026, a handful are getting secret bail outs and 10,000 jobs are under threat.
-
2 weeks ago | 
wonkhe.com | Jim Dickinson |Mark Leach
It’s hard to learn if you’re ill – good health is one of the classic prerequisites to learning. But one of the most frustrating things about the debate around student health in the UK is that there isn’t one. Anecdotally, poor access to preventative healthcare and health services tends to be justified either by NHS pressure from an ageing population or by expectations that universities should do more with less.
-
2 weeks ago | 
wonkhe.com | Jim Dickinson |Mark Leach |Mack Marshall |Mike Day
It was quite the paradox really. Sat in a glorious space in Lisbon specifically designed for groups of students to organise events where they can eat (inexpensively) and talk together, we met a Medical student leader from Portugal and a Pharmacy student leader from Moldova who were both thinking hard about their future.
-
2 weeks ago | 
wonkhe.com | Mark Leach
This week on the podcast the SUs team has been on a study tour to universities in Lisbon in Portugal, and have reflections on everything from space to food, from interdisciplinarity to curriculum design and from Praxe to ribbon burning. With Khadiza Hossein, VP Education at UWE SU, Emillia Zirker, Student Representation Officer at Lincoln SU, Gary Hughes, CEO at Durham SU, Mack Marshall, Community and Policy Officer at Wonkhe and hosted by Jim Dickinson, Associate Editor at Wonkhe.
-
2 weeks ago | 
wonkhe.com | Hugh Jones |Mark Leach
It’s 1959, and Durham University is still a federal university, with colleges in Durham and Newcastle. And expansion in Durham was underway. Elvet Hill, just south of the River Wear, had already seen St Mary’s College move in 1952 from its old site; and now a new college was being built. The college was to be named Grey College, after Charles Grey, Prime Minister when the university was founded (Grey may also have been the earl who inspired the eponymous tea).
-
1 month ago | 
wonkhe.com | Jim Dickinson |Mark Leach
I went along to AHUA conference on Tuesday, and saw a fascinating presentation from Esa Hämäläinen, who’s the Director of Administration at the University of Helsinki. The university has easily one of my favourite origin stories – it was established by a 13-year-old girl who the world came to know as Queen Christina of Sweden. It also has a cracking set of values, some of which appear now to be the sort of thing that’s banned by the Office for Students in England.
