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  • Pepperdine Closes Exhibit Featuring “Overtly Political” Art

    Pepperdine Closes Exhibit Featuring “Overtly Political” Art

    Pepperdine officials modified a sculpture to delete the text.

    Henry Adams/Pepperdine Graphic

    Last month Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., opened an art exhibit titled “Hold My Hand In Yours,” which was scheduled to run for six months in the on-campus Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art. But On Oct. 6, the university closed the exhibit after artists learned their work had been removed or altered for being “overtly political.”

    The exhibition, curated by Weisman Museum director Andrea Gyorody, centered on the imagery of hands in paintings, drawings, sculpture and videos, among other media, with a focus on hands as a means of labor and care, according to the museum’s website.

    Last week, one of the artists in the show learned her video had been turned off at the university’s request, and a sculpture had been modified to hide text that said “Save the Children” and “Abolish ICE,” Hyperallergic reported. The creators requested their pieces be removed from the museum, and several other contributors followed suit in solidarity with the affected artists and in opposition to the university.

    Pepperdine administrators alleged the pieces went against the museum’s policy to “avoid overtly political content consistent with the university’s nonprofit status,” Michael Friel, senior director of communication and public relations at Pepperdine, told Inside Higher Ed in an email.

    In addition to removing pieces, the university inquired about posting signage that notifies visitors that “the artwork does not necessarily reflect the views of the university,” Friel noted. “That process has not been successful.” With the addition of the artists pulling their work, the museum decided to close the gallery. All compensation agreements are being honored and inconvenienced artists have received an apology, according to Friel.

    “For the past week, the administration’s rationale for the initial censorship and removal has been murky and opaque, and honestly, still unclear to me. It didn’t have to be this way,” Stephanie Syjuco, an artist who was featured in the show, wrote on Instagram.

    The Weisman Museum is housed under the university’s advancement office. “Our intent is to maintain the highest standards of excellence as we celebrate artistic expression through the visual arts,” Friel said.

    In 2019, Pepperdine censored a senior art student’s gallery because the art featured nude bodies; officials placed the art in a mobile gallery instead of in the Weisman Museum, which featured work by the artist’s peers.  



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  • East Africa’s Queer communities show progress and hope

    East Africa’s Queer communities show progress and hope

    Around the world, Queer rights are being challenged, attacked and denied. Governments are cutting budgets for important health and other programmes. 

    But in parts of Africa, there are distinct signs of progress. Organizations that serve and advocate for Queer communities in Eastern Africa now see hope for the future. That’s the case even in Uganda where “aggravated homosexuality” has carried the death penalty since 2023.

    “It is still a very hard environment but we are doing much better than a lot of people think,” said Brian Aliganyira, founder and executive director of the Ark Wellness Hub, an organization based in Kampala, Uganda, that helps LGBT community members who have difficulty accessing health services in public hospitals due to both anti-Queer laws and ongoing community stigma and discrimination.

    “We are doing better in terms of fighting back and supporting communities, not necessarily better in terms of protection, rights and freedoms,” Aliganyira said. 

    In Kenya, homosexual acts are illegal. Rodney Otieno, who is the co-founder and policy director for the Queer & Allied Chamber of Commerce Africa of Nairobi (QACC), described the creation of a “Queer ecosystem” that mobilises resources, builds social enterprises, creates sustainable economic pathways for people of the Queer community and attracts impact investments – using money for good causes even as it generates wealth. The QACC now boasts over 3,000 members in Kenya, plus others across Africa.

    Language and discrimination

    Otieno and the four other East African community leaders interviewed for this article generally prefer to use the more fluid term “Queer” rather than “LGBTQ” or any of its many variations. 

    Kevin Ngabo, a Queer activist and social justice advocate, said that local languages often lack positive or even neutral words to describe queer identities — only stigmatizing ones.

    “‘Queer’ gives us an umbrella that feels both flexible and affirming, allowing people to belong without being boxed in by rigid categories,” Ngabo said. “It’s a way of saying: I am different and that difference is valid.”,

    Ngabo was born and raised in Rwanda before moving to Nairobi, Kenya late last year.

    In Rwanda, there are no anti-discrimination laws but the government does not recognize same-sex marriages. 

    Pride in one’s identity

    A Queer rights activist in Kigali, who asked not to be identified, said that young people are feeling more comfortable with their identities. “GenZers are taking up more space as their authentic selves,” the activist said. “They are even getting more understanding and affection from their families. It is not ‘weird’ anymore. This will become the norm.”

    The Kigali activist has recently been involved in both a Pride Party and a Queer film festival, which attracted over 600 paying participants from around the region. 

    Queer community leaders point out different elements of both recent progress and hopes for sustainable success in the future beyond the constant imperative to keep community members safe and to try to get discriminatory laws repealed.

    “We need to continue to work together, make good use of our limited resources, be clear about what we are doing, raise awareness and be diplomatic when dealing with the authorities” says another anonymous Queer activist and feminist in Rwanda.

    Ngabo in Nairobi believes that Queer people across the region need to develop a strong sense of community and be “stubborn when they are told they can’t do something, and take space and stand up for what they believe in.”

    Finding allies to your cause

    Aliganyira in Kampala agrees that people should not run away from their ongoing challenges with safety, respect and equal opportunity and instead continue to show courage, resilience and perseverance to defend their current rights and expand them in future.

    A Queer activist in Rwanda stressed the need to work with allies and others to create more education and training to promote awareness, understanding and empathy.

    Ngabo shared some advice: “Start small and start where you are,” he said. “Speak up when you hear harmful stereotypes. Make space for people to share their stories without fear. Support Queer-led groups, attend events, or even just show up for your friends when they need someone safe to lean on.”

    Allyship isn’t always grand, he said. “It’s often in the quiet, consistent choices to affirm someone’s humanity,” he said.

    Queer community leaders say they are generally optimistic about the future.

    “In five to 10 years’ time, the narrative will change completely,” said Otieno in Nairobi.

    Changing people’s perceptions

    Young queer activists are being empowered and learning how to take on leadership roles in government and in other decision-making spaces, said one Rwandan activist.

    Another Rwandan activist envisions a future where same sex couples will be able to get married, adopt kids and access medical services freely.  

    “Things will improve if we are smart,” the activist said. “I hope we will see more safe spaces, more affirming healthcare (especially in mental health), more economic inclusion, and more media and policy-making representation. In the end though, dignity is more important than law changes.”

    Ngabo in Nairobi agrees: “We want respect,” he said. “We want to feel safe. We don’t want equality. We want equal opportunities. We want to thrive.”

    Real progress means being able to live authentically without having to conform, he said. “Stronger protections under the law, safe spaces to gather, visibility in public life, and most importantly, Queer people leading the narrative about our own lives,” Ngabo said. “These are what a brighter future looks like to me.”

    Even in Uganda, Aliganyira believes things can still change for the better.

    Uganda was once considered the safest place for Queer people in East Africa before the 1990s, he said.

    “Uganda can undo what it has done and get beyond fear and uncertainty,” he said. “It’s up to everyone to come together and overcome division.”

    Questions to consider:

    1. Why do LGBTQIA+ community members in East Africa prefer to call themselves “Queer”?

    2. What are the key elements of a brighter future for the East African Queer communities?

    3. What can you do yourself to stand up for human rights as an ally or a member of a Queer community where you live?

     

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  • Student suicides: why stable data still demand urgent reform 

    Student suicides: why stable data still demand urgent reform 

    Author:
    Emma Roberts

    Published:

    This HEPI guest blog was kindly authored by Emma Roberts, Head of Law at the University of Salford. 

    New figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that student suicide rates in England and Wales for the period 2016 to 2023 remain stable – but stability is no cause for complacency. The age-adjusted suicide rate among higher education students stands at 6.9 deaths per 100,000, compared with 10.2 per 100,000 for the general population of the same age group. Over the seven years of data collection, there were 1,163 student deaths by suicide – that is around 160 lives lost every year. 

    The rate being lower than the wider population is encouraging and may reflect the investment the sector has made in recent years. Universities have developed more visible wellbeing services, invested in staff training and created stronger cultures of awareness around mental health. The relative stability in the data can be seen as evidence that these interventions matter. But stability is not a resolution. Each student suicide is a preventable tragedy. The data should therefore be read not as reassurance, but as a call to sustain momentum and prepare for the challenges that lie ahead. 

    What the ONS data tells us 

    The figures highlight some familiar patterns. Male students remain at significantly higher risk than female students, accounting for nearly two-thirds of all suicides. Undergraduate students are at greater risk than postgraduate students, while students living at home have the lowest suicide rate. The data also shows that rates among White students are higher than for Black or Asian students, though the sample sizes are small, so these figures may be less reliable. 

    In terms of trend, the highest rate was recorded in the 2019 academic year (8.8 per 100,000). Since then, the rate has fallen back but remains stubbornly consistent, with 155 deaths recorded in the most recent year. The ONS notes that these figures are subject to revision due to coroner delays, meaning even the latest year may be under-reported. 

    The key point is that the problem is not worsening, but it is also not going away. 

    A changing student demographic 

    This year’s recruitment trends have introduced a new variable. Several high-tariff providers (universities with the highest entry requirements) have reduced entry requirements in order to secure numbers. This can open up opportunities for students who might otherwise not have had access to selective institutions. But it does raise important questions about preparedness. 

    Students admitted through lower tariffs may bring with them different kinds of needs and pressures: greater financial precarity, additional academic transition challenges, or less familiarity with the social and cultural capital that selective universities sometimes assume. These are all recognised risk factors for stress, isolation and, in some cases, mental ill-health. Universities with little prior experience of supporting this demographic may find their existing systems under strain. 

    Building on progress, not standing still 

    Much good work is already being done. Many universities have strengthened their partnerships with local National Health Service (NHS) trusts, introduced proactive wellbeing campaigns and embedded support more visibly in the student journey. We should recognise and celebrate this progress. 

    At the same time, the ONS data is a reminder that now is not the moment to stand still. Stability in the numbers reflects the effort made – but it should also prompt us to ask whether our systems are sufficiently flexible and resilient to meet new pressures. The answer, for some institutions, may well be yes. For others, particularly those adapting to new student demographics, there is a real risk of being caught unprepared. 

    What needs to happen next 

    There are several constructive steps the sector can take: 

    • Stress-test provision:  
      Assess whether wellbeing and safeguarding structures are designed to support the needs of the current, not historic, intake. 
    • Broaden staff capacity:  
      Ensure that all staff, not just specialists, have the awareness and training to spot early warning signs so that distress does not go unnoticed. 
    • Strengthen partnerships:  
      Align more closely with local NHS and community services to prevent students falling between two in-demand systems. 
    • Share practice sector-wide:  
      Collectively learn across the sector. Good practice must be disseminated, not siloed. 

    These are not dramatic or expensive interventions. They are achievable and pragmatic steps that can reduce risk while broader debates about legal and regulatory reform continue. 

    Conclusion 

    The ONS data shows that student suicide is not escalating. But the rate remains concerningly consistent at a level that represents an unacceptable loss of life each year. The progress universities have made should be acknowledged, but the danger of complacency is real. As recruitment patterns shift and new student demographics emerge, the sector must ensure that safeguarding and wellbeing systems are ready to adapt. 

    Every statistic represents a life lost. Stability must not become complacency – it should be a call to action, a chance to consolidate progress, anticipate new challenges and keep the prevention of every avoidable death at the heart of institutional priorities. 

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  • The Importance of Connection in the Age of AI – Faculty Focus

    The Importance of Connection in the Age of AI – Faculty Focus

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  • The Importance of Connection in the Age of AI – Faculty Focus

    The Importance of Connection in the Age of AI – Faculty Focus

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  • A joined up post-16 system requires system-level thinking combined with local action

    A joined up post-16 system requires system-level thinking combined with local action

    There have been so many conversations and speculations and recommendations aired about the forthcoming post-16 skills and education white paper that you’d be forgiven for thinking it already had been published months ago.

    But no, it’s expected this week some time – possibly as early as Monday – and so for everyone’s sanity it’s worth rehearsing some of the framing drivers and intentions behind it, clearing the deck before the thing finally arrives and we start digesting the policy detail.

    The policy ambition is clear: a coherent and coordinated post-16 “tertiary” sector in England, that offers viable pathways to young people and adult learners through the various levels of education and into employment, contributing to economic growth through providing the skilled individuals the country needs.

    The political challenge is also real: with Reform snapping at Labour’s heels, the belief that the UK can “grow its own” skills, and offer opportunity and the prospect of economic security to its young people across the country must become embedded in the national psyche if the government is to see off the threat.

    The politics and policy combine in the Prime Minister’s announcement at Labour Party Conference of an eye-catching new target for two thirds of young people to participate in some form of higher-level learning. That positions next week’s white paper as a longer term systemic shift rather than, say, a strategy for tackling youth unemployment in this parliament – though it’s clear there is also an ambition for the two to go hand in hand, with skills policy now sitting across both DfE and DWP.

    Insert tab a into slot b

    The aspiration to achieve a more joined up and functioning system is laudable – in the best of all possible worlds steering a middle course between the worst excesses and predatory behaviours of the free market, and an overly controlling hand from Whitehall. But the more you try to unpick what’s happening right now, the more you see how fragmented the current “system” is, with incentives and accountabilities all over the place. That’s why you can have brilliant FE and HE institutions delivering life-changing education opportunities, at the same time as the system as a whole seems to be grinding its gears.

    Last week, a report from the Association of Colleges and Universities UK Delivering a joined-up post-16 skills system showcased some of the really great regional collaborations already in place between FE colleges and universities, and also set out some of the barriers to collaboration including financial pressures causing different providers to chase the same students in the same subjects rather than strategically differentiating their offer; and different regulatory and student finance systems for different kinds of learners and qualifications creating complexity in the system.

    But it’s not only about the willingness and capability of different kinds of provider to coordinate with each other. It’s about the perennial urge of policymakers to tinker with qualifications and set up new kinds of provider creating additional complexity – and the complicating role of private training and HE provision operating “close to market” which can have a distorting effect on what “public” institutions are able to offer. It’s about the lack of join-up even within government departments, never mind across them. It’s also about the pervasiveness of the cultural dichotomy (and hierarchy) between perceptions of white-collar/professional and blue-collar/manual work, and the ill-informed class distinctions and capability-based assumptions underpinning them.

    Some of this fragmentation can be addressed through system-wide harmonisation – such as the intent through the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE) to implement one system of funding for all level 4–6 courses, and bringing all courses in that group under the regulatory purview of the Office for Students. AoC and UUK have also identified a number of areas where potential overlaps could be resolved through system-wide coordination: between OfS, Skills England, and mayoral strategic authorities; between the LLE and the Growth and Skills Levy; and between local skills improvement plans and the (national) industrial strategy. It would be odd indeed if the white paper did not make provision for this kind of coordination.

    But even with efforts to coordinate and harmonise, in any system there is naturally occurring variation – in how employers in different industries are thinking about, reporting, and investing in skills, and at what levels, in the expectations and tolerance of different prospective students for study load, learning environment, scale of the costs of learning, and support needs, and in the relationship between a place, its economy and its people. The implications of those variations are best understood by the people who are closest to the problem.

    The future is emergent

    Complex systems have emergent properties, ie the stuff that happens because lots of actors responded to the world as they saw it but that could not necessarily have been predicted. Policy is always generating unforeseen outcomes. And it doesn’t matter how many data wonks and uber-brains you have in the Civil Service, they’ll still not be able to plot every possible outcome as any given policy intervention works its way through the system.

    So for a system to work you need good quality feedback loops in which insight arrives in a timely way on the desks of responsible actors who have the capability, opportunity and motivation to adapt in light of them. In the post-16 system that’s about education and civic leaders being really good at listening to their students, their communities and to employers – and investing in quality in civic leadership (and identifying and ejecting bad apples) should be one of the ways that a post-16 skills system can be made to work.

    But good leaders need to be afforded the opportunity to decide what their response will be to the specifics of the needs they have identified and be trusted, to some degree, to act in the public interest. So from a Whitehall perspective the question the white paper needs to answer is not only how the different bits of the system ought to join up, but whether the people who are instrumental in making it work themselves have the skills, information and flexibility to take action when it inevitably doesn’t.

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  • One Aus university in top 50 THE rankings – Campus Review

    One Aus university in top 50 THE rankings – Campus Review

    Australia’s universities have charged up the global leaderboard in a year where many of their international peers lost ground, according to a world-renowned tertiary rankings list.

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  • Universities in the age of intelligent machines – Campus Review

    Universities in the age of intelligent machines – Campus Review

    When Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called ‘godfather of AI’, declared in 2016 that ‘we should stop training radiologists now,’ his warning caused a stir.

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  • Students on the UQ experience – Campus Review

    Students on the UQ experience – Campus Review

    University of Queensland pro-vice-chancellor of education and student experience Suzanna Le Mire hosted a student panel at the Queensland Commitment summit in October.

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  • We know the detail. But what’s the story?

    We know the detail. But what’s the story?

    If you’ve heard Jacqui Smith interviewed since she became minister, you’ll know that she’s been saying that the Skills and Post-16 White Paper has been nearly ready for quite some time.

    It may well be the case that most of the contents of the paper have been pretty much locked in for a good while, with others added to the work in progress as the need became apparent.

    And it isn’t just a Department for Education thing. Every part of government will have had an input, both during the formal “write round” that has just concluded and earlier in policy development. The launch will be in the government’s grid – lines will be agreed across Number 10 and the Cabinet Office.

    And there will be a story to tell. Which is where we find our problem.

    Big P

    The most common criticism leveled against Keir Starmer, by his own party more than anyone, is his inability to sell a big picture. Starmer, like many attracted to public policy and public service, is into details, implementation, and delivery. If five to ten years ago our politics was dominated by grand narratives (Brexit, the whole Boris Johnson thing, Liz Truss’ persecution complex), Sunak and Starmer both came to power with more than a whiff of “the grown ups are back in the room”. Delivery rules, ideology drools.

    There’s any amount of polling that suggests much of the frustration among voters is due to things just not working as well or as smoothly as they should. From getting an appointment with a GP, to getting support for a child struggling at school, to getting a dangerous pothole fixed it can feel like the UK is riven with structures and processes on the point of collapsing.

    A part of this is underinvestment – since 2010 funding for local government (which is responsible for the potholes and the pupil support) has collapsed, while growing funding for the NHS (which is responsible for the GP) has not covered increases in demand and has been blunted by numerous top-down reorganisations.

    But a part of this is an inability to do the hard yards on delivery, something which Starmer and Labour are keen to fix. Admirable intentions, but it is much harder to explain to people that we are at the start of a long, complex, and difficult process of renewal than to make absurd promises, stir up xenophobia, and have people believe that these days you can get arrested and put in jail just for saying you are English.

    Even delivery needs a story. Tony Blair, for all his myriad faults as a human being, was your archetypal get-you-one-that-does-both. But that is a rare skillset. The rest of us flounder making dull but important stuff sound interesting and inspiring.

    And so the story begins

    The opportunity mission in the Labour election manifesto highlighted a focus on improving the life chances of children, right the way through from pre-school to entering the workforce. In government, the formal measure of the success for this area of work is the proportion of young people in education or employment-with-training, and the number achieving higher level qualifications.

    Sounds like a set of indicators in need of a target? It doesn’t take a huge strategic leap to read across from this to the Prime Minister’s announcement at conference: a target of around 60 per cent (or two thirds, it all depends which announcement you read) of young people in higher education or a “gold standard” apprenticeship.

    That’s not a target that, if read strictly by the numbers, has much to do with “widening access” as traditionally described: there’s no sub-targets for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. For that we look at Bridget Phillipson’s preview of the decision to reintroduce targeted grants (ignoring for the moment the plan to fund them via an international student fee levy).

    But this is unlikely to be the only intervention that is aimed directly at widening access. We know now that V levels – a BTEC-esque option that will sit between very academic A levels and apprenticeship-like T levels – will add another option to the choices offered aged 16, hopefully keeping more people in education for longer.

    Even though the opportunity mission focuses on young people, we also know that the government is concerned with what we might call “adult skills”. Over in the economic growth mission is where find all the stuff about Skills England and training providers. What we don’t find – even though it by rights should be there – is the Lifelong Learning Entitlement, a Boris Johnson policy of letting adult learners access student loan style finance which ended up accidentally re-writing the entire basis of student loan finance.

    Another Johnson-era policy that plays in here are the Local Skills Improvement Plans (LSIPs), which help local employers ensure that their prospective employees are given the opportunity to develop the skills they need. Supposedly Skills England adds the national perspective on these local plans, helping to design identified skills needs into wider initiatives like apprenticeship standards and qualification design.

    Universities and higher education don’t exactly jump off the page of either of these missions. Accordingly, policy interventions in the sector have been minimal. The inflationary fee increase was a simple matter of letting existing information work in the way it was originally intended. The changes to implementation of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act was simply a matter of removing the actually insane components of an otherwise largely pointless piece of legislation.

    Vote reform

    But there was another early intervention – a letter from Secretary of State Bridget Phillipson that has become known as the “HE reform” agenda (not to be confused with the “HE reform” consultation from 2022, that almost established student number controls based on minimum eligibility requirements). It was a series of asks for the sector, perceived as a quid pro quo for the return of the inflationary fee increase.

    In essence this had five components. Let’s use the minister’s exact words:

    • Play a stronger role in expanding access and improving outcomes for disadvantaged students
    • Make a stronger contribution to economic growth
    • Play a greater civic role in their communities
    • Raise the bar further on teaching standards, to maintain and improve our world-leading reputation and drive out poor practice
    • Underpinning all of this needs to sit a sustained efficiency and reform programme

    What’s interesting here is the absence of targets. Phillipson wants a stronger role, a stronger contribution, a greater role, a raising of the bar – but how far and how high, and how will she know when she has what she wants? It is a fair guess that we are due some numbers on these aspirations.

    The other thing to pull out here is the relationship between the regulator and the government. In England, most of these HE reform requests involves work that sits under the Office for Students (I’m happy to accept written submissions suggesting that Research England has oversight on elements of economic growth and the civic role).

    A pattern that I’ve recently been noticing is that OfS and DfE to not appear to be moving in sync at the moment – a DfE consultation on franchise arrangements appeared shortly before a largely unconnected OfS consultation on the same topic, OfS appeared to be startled by the appearance of its own guidance letter, and the biggest thing OfS has done recently – the mega-consultation on quality – appears to have blindsided DfE.

    So achieving the HE reform objectives (however loosely specified) also involves regulatory reform. And that regulatory reform appears to be closely tied to the Behan review.

    Quality Behan-cement

    Towards the end of the last government it was open season on reviewing the Office for Students. The Department for Education conducted a (largely unhelpful) legislative review of the way HERA was working in 2022, which spurred the House of Lords Industry and Regulators committee to foreground some of the more egregious failings of the OfS. The Behan review, which built on the findings of both, was one of the periodic reviews of regulators that usually pass without notice – what was notable was that the review author proceeded to take over as interim chair after the sad loss of James Wharton from public life.

    Behan’s review was focused on making regulation work better – focusing on efficacy, accountability, governance, and efficiency. It is the source – for example – of the plans to bring together the Teaching Excellence Framework and the B3 conditions of registration into a single quality assurance system. This modified and expanded TEF will, in future, feed into the eligibility of providers to access certain funds and opportunities – in particular the ability to offer Lifelong Learning Entitlement modules.

    Much of Behan was predicated on changes to primary legislation – the contradictions and confusion within HERA was getting in the way of a streamlined regulatory approach. We’ve been over some of the possibilities of tidying up legislation on the site before – it’s niche stuff unlikely to raise pulses outside of Wonkhe’s most devoted readership. And it would be a brave government that promoted a glossy higher education and skills bill devoid entirely of policy – imagine, given the mess the sector is in, trying to front out legislative proposals that basically amount to letting the OfS board choose the chief executive rather than the secretary of state?

    The question of regulation has also hit the headlines with an onslaught of problems with franchising. Currently students can be registered at one provider and taught elsewhere, with the quality of that teaching (and the outcomes experienced by those students) falling outside of the OfS’ ambit. There are both OfS and DfE proposals designed to address this issue – a DfE consultation required that teaching partners over a certain size needing to be registered with OfS, and an OfS consultation called for new conditions of registration for registering partners.

    The frustration is palpable – with DfE recently called out by the courts for riding roughshod over due process in order to censure Oxford Business College, and the National Audit Office calling on OfS, DfE, and the Student Loans Company to get their act together in addressing instances of student loan fraud. The regulatory toolkit is simply not up to the job.

    Fun with funding

    OfS, meanwhile, has very much been thinking about funding – a quietly radical change to the collection rules for HESES (the means by which we get the student number information that underpins most of the remaining direct OfS grants), adding in some very detailed information on subjects, prefigures a forthcoming consultation on how it uses the money (just under £2bn) it still allocates for high-cost subjects and student premiums.

    Any subject based approach, when it appears, will surely be informed by the government’s own list of priority subjects – found (again) within the eligibility rules for the LLE, and ported across to the eligibility of some students from deprived backgrounds for new maintenance grants. For all the talk of a data-driven Skills England, and detailed information on precise employer demands, the list is broad. We’re broadly in STEM world, plus architecture (but not landscape gardening), nursing and allied health, and economics. And not medicine.

    Meanwhile, university finances have reached the stage where the only reliable source of income is via recruiting international students. This approach took a knock with changes to dependent visas for most students, but now the government has decided that it wants a slice via a levy – which will be used (in part) to support these new maintenance grants.

    With both provider and student finances at breaking point (genuine financial hardship, attrition, job losses, course cuts), there doesn’t appear to be any appetite for a meaningful rethink of funding in either case. Despite everyone yelling about nothing else since the pandemic, it appears to be the one thing that is definitely off the table in the short to medium term.

    Pieces of paper

    A white paper is a consultation – it is a selection box of policies and plans pulled together to present the next chapter of the government’s narratives on opportunities, skills, and the economy. It will certainly contain measures designed to address the knotty technical and implementation issues described above, but it also requires an element of vision.

    On one level, there is clearly a – very broad – skills vision. The language of opportunity, and of parity of respect for academic and vocational routes, is a rich and resonant one. It is no coincidence that every UK government for the past decade as used a version of this narrative, and it has been duplicated (with a few tweaks) across the ideological spectrum precisely because it is so powerful. However, an increasingly prominent component of this story has been positioned as a critique of the current state of affairs, and the plight of our universities and wider higher education sector. Despite the diversity of the sector, it is specifically universities – and a particular, largely inaccurate popular perception of universities – that are being seen as a problem on the way to a skills-led solution rather than an underfunded and struggling keystone.

    While the policies over every party have elements of this counter-narrative too – the Labour variant is perhaps kinder than the alternatives (see, for example, Badenoch). But it is not a full-throated defence of the sector. It is not simple or straightforward to draw together the various things Labour has done in the higher education space and tell a convincing story that includes a theory of change and a desired end state.

    So, while it is fairly straightforward to parse the hints and directions of travel that the past 18 months have brought into a series of likely next steps, the fact that none of these steps do much to inspire suggests that this can’t be the whole story. If it was, we’d be looking at a series of uncontroversial pieces of secondary legislation and some changes to the regulatory framework.

    The format of a white paper demands a little more.

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