From the Director
Little thoughts, ideas and everything else I can’t convince my colleagues to let me write a paper about.
“You can go, you can afford to stay, and it will add value when you leave”
At Labour Conference 2026, I joined a panel considering what Labour's offer to students ought to be. Here's a version of my answer!
Kemi the Conqueror? Something of an embroidery…
The Conservatives are enchanted with their leader, but her big offer to young adults is compulsion where a tertiary strategy should be – and no one in Birmingham seems to think they'll get to enact it anyway.
Alright stop, collaborate and listen
With The Collaboration Question event on the horizon, some musing about Multi-Academy Trusts and why HE doesn't have them.
Labouring under a misapprehension
Government needs to realise that memory-holing the university sector and its issues may reduce awkward questions right now, but no strategy for NEETs, let alone broader prosperity in every postcode, is happening without it.
What might “Progress 8” for universities look like?
Tony Moss has taken a well-known data set and interrogated it more thoroughly than has previously been done, to create a value-add index for HE, based on all the students from disadvantaged backgrounds a provider aimed to support, not just those who made it to the end of their degree.
Why the way we pay for higher education is everyone’s problem
It is hard to make the case for public investment in colleges and training providers when the dominant narrative says that the other half of the post-16 system has already solved its funding problem. But hasn't: it has just found a more sophisticated way of not talking about it.
Is another future for English higher education possible?
Is another future possible? Well, one is coming, whether you want it or not: the current system cannot survive. It is already dying as we speak. Which, I think, leaves three questions for everyone who works in it.
Is it possible that both Nick Gibb and Lucy Powell are right?
The sector can be both optimistic and worried about Burnham’s HE agenda
Noted public policy thinker and opponent-murdering enthusiast Vladimir Lenin allegedly once said: “There are decades when nothing happens, then there are weeks when decades happen.”
A review of higher education funding is inevitable
As John Blake is announced as the first Director of The Post-18 Project, he argues that politicians must not ignore the feelings running ever deeper about the student loans system.