Twenty years of effort to widen access to university has, by one measure, worked. In England, a quarter of full-time entrants now come from the most deprived fifth of neighbourhoods, which is more...
What a Student is Assumed to Know
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Who holds the standard?
The sector's own quality code was finalised this week. It has rested on twelve agreed principles since 2024; three sets of practical advice were issued last summer, and the remaining nine were...
What a university might “owe” a student in difficulty
A court in the United States decided this summer that a university was responsible, in part, for the death of a student at a fraternity party; a student society of the residential, invitation-only...
What a restructure teaches
A sector commentary this week argued that students who appear disengaged are, in most cases, adapting sensibly to a university that has grown thin; one that offers flexibility and efficiency whilst...
Shown rather than said
Two readings of what a degree is worth arrived within a week of each other this summer and they point in opposite directions. A national survey of more than ten thousand undergraduates found the...
Governing for a place
Much of what will shape the coming year for universities rooted in a particular place is being decided far from the institutions themselves. A funding settlement is being argued over between...
What an improvement plan is written for
The plans are being written now. Across the sector this month, in the weeks between one admissions cycle closing and the next cohort arriving, teams are assembling the documents that will govern the...
The measure and the question it was built to ask
A new benchmark of university admissions was published at the start of this week, and within a day it had become a ranking. There is no great mystery in that. A set of scores covering ninety-four...
The offer and the obligation that follows
For some years, contextual admissions sat among the sector's more contested practices, defended by providers who had thought carefully about it and regarded warily by those who read any adjustment...
Candour as a habit, not a clause
The sector's governance expectations have shifted their centre of gravity. Where an earlier generation of codes concerned itself chiefly with the machinery of oversight, its committee structures,...
What promotion rewards and what good teaching actually needs
Academic careers have long run on two different clocks. The research clock is unforgiving but at least legible; its demand condensed into a phrase that every early-career academic learns to dread....
When a civic claim acquires a price
For the better part of a decade, universities have described themselves as civic institutions. The vocabulary has become almost standard, running through the anchor institution, the place-based...
Disadvantage rarely arrives one variable at a time
That disadvantage compounds: poverty, place, gender, and ethnicity combine rather than operate in isolation, is not a new thought for anyone working in this part of the sector. Intersectionality has...
Asking, and the harder business of answering
Few practices in higher education are as thoroughly established, and as rarely examined, as the gathering of student feedback. Surveys arrive at the end of modules, at the close of the year, after...
Fewer and less sure
Two pieces of evidence arrived within days of each other this month and they have mostly been discussed apart. The first is demographic and by now familiar. The number of eighteen-year-olds in the...
Belonging by design: what a reassuring number cannot see
There is a particular comfort in a high number. When a survey question about feeling part of a community of students and staff returns a result close to four in five positive, it offers...
The shape that no board has chosen
recruitment, redistribution and what governance can see Two reports landed on the sector's reading list this week. Each tells a different story. Read separately, as they often are, they describe two...
When the policy conversation shifts:
from preventing failure to managing it. Earlier this month, a select committee report on higher education funding in England made a series of recommendations that have already attracted considerable...
When the moment fades:
higher education and the politics of consensus Three elections held on the same day last week returned three governments unable to act alone. In Wales, Plaid Cymru emerged as the largest party in...
The slow asset:
Europe Day, Erasmus and what governance reporting does not easily see Europe Day this year, the seventy-sixth anniversary of the Schuman Declaration, falls at an unusually rich moment for UK higher...
When wellbeing is the wrong word:
burnout, depression and the locus of institutional response A particular vocabulary has become familiar in higher education over the past decade. It is the vocabulary of wellbeing. We speak of...
The lever that was asked to carry too much
The way a system is designed tends to become invisible once it has been running long enough. The arrangements are settled, the assumptions harden and the decisions made at the outset stop looking...
The governance of the invisible
When strategic risks accumulate beneath institutional attention The mounting technical debt highlighted in sector commentary this week offers a sobering reminder of how easily strategic risks can...
What regulation is for
There is something useful, if occasionally disorientating, about watching a new regulatory system come into being. Most of the time, regulation arrives already embedded in institutional practice:...
The wrong kind of caution?
There is something about a long Easter weekend that invites a different kind of thinking—one that the busy working week hardly allows. It seemed a good moment, then, to sit with a question that has...
What assessment was designed to do
New research published this week by Wonkhe asks a question that initially sounds like it is about AI but turns out to be about something older and, in some ways, more uncomfortable. The research,...
When the architecture can’t keep up
There is a sentence in coverage of new sector research on AI in learning and teaching that stopped me this week. Reporting on a series of round tables with senior education leaders, the authors...
The question the regulator hasn’t answered
Eight years is a long time to leave a basic question unanswered. The Office for Students (OfS) has regulated higher education in England since January 2018, and yet the sector remains unable to say...
The quality question the HE sector exported
The passage of the Medical Training (Prioritisation) Bill last week was, in political terms, a relatively contained piece of legislation. Designed to give graduates of UK medical schools priority...
The question we forgot to ask
Something in this week's Wonkhe discussion about AI and human learning caught my attention. The central premise, put fairly, is that artificial intelligence tilts educational value away from...
The view from the pavement
I regularly visit my local town centre. What I find there are numerous empty units, boarded windows, talk of a regeneration masterplan displayed on the boarded up windows of a retailer that itself...
When the foundations shift
and what the student loan crisis means for institutional governance Last week, I reflected on what the accumulation of provider-level financial data might mean for the relationship between the...
When evidence accumulates
What the sector's financial data is and isn't telling us. This week, Wonkhe published David Kernohan’s annual analysis of the sector’s financial statements. It makes for sobering reading. Of the 132...
What does a First actually tell us?
Almost twenty years ago, the Burgess Group concluded that the UK honours degree classification system was no longer fit for purpose. The group, convened by Universities UK, recommended the...
Educating for uncertainty
what International Day of Education asks of us Friday, 24 January, marks International Day of Education. Proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in 2018, it offers an annual moment to...
The knowledge we cannot speak:
why institutions struggle to articulate their own value The Taxpayers' Alliance's recent list of allegedly "Mickey Mouse" courses prompted the usual round of institutional responses. Some...
The January Question
When individual intervention meets structural constraint January can be a month when students quietly fail to return. The festive break provides a natural pause and for some, that pause extends...
The stories we tell and the ones we live
As 2025 winds down, a familiar tension has resurfaced in UK higher education. Universities are, simultaneously, national assets that governments under-appreciate and institutions that sit...
The quality that metrics miss
The Office for Students consultation on quality regulation closes this week and much of the sector's attention has understandably focused on the proposed changes to TEF and the implications of...
When the tide goes out:
recruitment patterns and the geography of opportunity The Office for Students published its latest financial sustainability update last month, and buried within the headline figures about...
When the numbers don’t add up:
What governing bodies owe students in straitened times The Office for Students' latest financial sustainability bulletin indicates that, without mitigating measures, 45 per cent of English higher...
When Good Intentions Meet Regulatory Architecture:
Reflections on Belonging in Access and Participation Plans Jim Dickinson's recent analysis in WONKHE of belonging interventions in approved Access and Participation Plans raises questions that many...
When accountability looks the wrong way…
Some reflections on university governance Reading this week's announcement that the Committee of University Chairs is reviewing its governance code, I found the historical parallel to 1985 striking....
Planning for educational excellence in an uncertain future
A new report from Wonkhe and Advance HE, based on roundtable discussions with senior education leaders, Advance HE principal fellows and student leaders, explores how institutions might secure...
The Space Between Autonomy and Influence…
...What the Skills White Paper Means for University Leaders The most interesting policy questions are rarely about what the government can formally compel. They concern the space between autonomy...
When the Data Finally Speaks…
What the Franchising Crisis Means for Providers Seeking Authorisation The publication of the Office for Students' detailed outcomes data for subcontracted partnerships marks a significant moment in...
When enhancement frameworks…
...become funding mechanisms: the TEF-fee proposal The suggestion that undergraduate fee levels might be tied to Teaching Excellence Framework ratings appears, on the surface, to offer a...
On Targets, Levies and the Quiet Work of Transformation
The announcement of a new participation target—two-thirds of young people engaged in higher-level learning by 2040—arrived with predictable fanfare at last week's Labour Party conference. As someone...
On Surveying Staff in Difficult Times: Some Reflections
The recent Wonkhe staff survey findings merit careful consideration, not because they reveal entirely unexpected patterns, but rather because they provide empirical weight to concerns that many of...
TEF 2.0: Integration, incentives and the long wait ahead
When the TEF was first launched, it was meant to do something quite straightforward: encourage providers to think harder about the student experience. The promise was reputational; a gold, silver,...