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In: Education, HE funding, tuition fees, & student loans, HE policy, Politics, Skills

Forget about canaries, the signs of impending doom are more like the sound of cracking rock thundering through the coal mine and debris collapsing around us. Here are just two recent signs. Sign 1 New research recently revealed that now more than half of supposedly full-time undergraduates are doing paid work for more than 15 hours a week and nearly a quarter have full-time jobs alongside their studies to make ends meet. The idea that students whinge about not having enough money is nothing new. (There are even a jokes about it in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale from the fourteenth century.) But we have reach a differentRead More →

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In: Careers education, information, advice & guidance, Fair access, HE policy, Social mobility
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I felt (quite literally) honoured recently to receive an invitation from the man who puts the ‘great’ into Paul Greatrix – none other than the Registrar of the University of Nottingham, the blogger, the podcaster and the chronicler of all things higher education.  He asked me to appear on his podcast My Imaginary University. If you’re not familiar with it (where have you been?), this is the closest thing the HE sector has to Desert Island Discs. It’s a ingeniously simple format in which Paul interviews someone, invites them to make some seemingly fantastical choices and, in the process, of course, they reveal as much about themselvesRead More →

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In: Careers education, information, advice & guidance, Education, Employability, Skills, Student choice
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Last week, the DfE announced that it was setting up a £12 million fund to encourage employers to offer work experience for T levels. Good news, right? Well, partly. If T Levels are ever going to be a mainstream success as a vocational qualification, they are going to need a lot more employer engagement. I mean a lot. When you have a bold and ambitious policy, you don’t get it to fly by giving it half a feather instead of a full set of wings