Tag: goodbye

  • Goodbye 2025 – HEPI

    Goodbye 2025 – HEPI

    With 2025 coming to a close, let’s take a look at what HEPI has been discussing over the past year.

    2025 was a busy year for HEPI (although which year isn’t…), both in terms of events, publications and blogs.

    In January, we were forward-focused, looking at sector financial sustainability, digital transformation, and presenting a vision for the future of higher education.

    In February, lots of people were writing about curriculum design: from credit transfer and lifelong learning, to specialist higher education institutions and assessing the benefits of the Health Education Consortium. We also published our Student Generative AI Survey 2025, which shows an unprecedented increase in the use of genAI among undergraduate students. This is now the most-read policy paper in HEPI’s history.

    In March and April, skills and employability took the forefront of our focus as we published blogs on apprenticeships and considered how to bridge the gap between further and higher education. We also published reports on Skills England and increasing employer support for the tertiary skills system in England.

    In May, prior to the start of his tenure as Chair of the OfS, Professor Edward Peck wrote for HEPI about his thoughts for the future of higher education, and the announcement that the government was ‘exploring’ a levy on the income universities receive from international tuition fees got the sector talking.

    In June, the undergraduate academic year wrapped up with HEPI’s Annual Conference, which focused on the student journey, as well as the publication of our 2025 Student Academic Experience Survey. This year’s survey found that 68% of undergraduates are now undertaking paid work during term time. This is a dramatic rise from just 42% in 2020. Also, this month, we were thrilled that the work of our Director, Nick Hillman, was recognised with an OBE.

    July saw the publication of a report highlighting the catastrophic state of language provision within the UK’s schools and universities and the big drop in formal language learning that has accompanied this.

    In August, we thought that the Post-16 Education and Skills white paper might be about to arrive, and even ran a blog asking what might be in it. But it was not to be. Despite that, there were still exciting developments in HEPI as we launched our new website and published the 2025 Minimum Income Standard for Students.

    September saw the start of the party conference season, with HEPI holding events at both the Labour and later the Conservative Party conferences. There was a particularly memorable moment during a HEPI panel event on Student Support at the Labour Party conference, when the Secretary of State for Education, Bridget Phillipson, announced in the main conference hall that targeted maintenance grants were returning. Alex Stanley of the NUS announced this to the room mid-panel, to much celebration. (We did not know the small print at this point.)

    In October, that long-awaited White Paper finally arrived (although a little closer to the evening than many of us would have liked) on 20 October. This then kicked off our 10-part blog series, platforming a range of voices and reactions in response to the paper. You can find our first response here, and our final one here.

    The government papers continued to roll in as the Curriculum and Assessment Review Final Report arrived on 5 November. Don’t worry, we covered this as well with a range of responses. A number of HEPI colleagues attended the inaugural Smart Thinking Think Tank awards, picking up the award for ‘Most Niche Report of the Year’ for our work on The hidden impact of menstruation on higher education. (In case you missed our Director of Policy, Rose Stephenson, shouting from the rooftops about this – research into menstruation is not niche, it is taboo!) However, the recognition from other think tankers and the ginormous jar of Smarties were both gratefully received.

    Then, in December, the big news was the announcement that Susan Lapworth will be leaving the OfS in Easter 2026. A remarkably prescient blog from HEPI President Bahram Bekhradnia on the OfS leadership had arrived a while before the announcement but these days the HEPI blog is so popular with authors that it sadly ended up being published after the event.

    So, as we arrive now in 2026, HEPI looks ahead to another packed year of events, topical blogs, and continued debate. We’re beginning our events schedule with a webinar with Advance HE at 11am on 13th January entitled ‘What can higher education leadership learn from other sectors?’. Do sign up here to join us!

    Thank you to everyone who has written for us, attended our events, supported our research, kept up with our blogs, and engaged with us in any way over the past year – HEPI couldn’t be here without you.

    The blog is back in full force for the new year, so do keep an eye out for our arrival in your inbox. If you fancy writing one for us, then take a look at the guidelines here, and send a draft to [email protected]

    We will see you for lots more debate throughout 2026!

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  • Saying goodbye to our glaciers

    Saying goodbye to our glaciers

    Across the world two billion people — around a quarter of the world’s population — depend on glaciers for water to irrigate fields for agriculture, provide drinking water and to generate electricity.

    But these glaciers are melting before our eyes.

    Consider that 10% of Iceland is covered by glaciers but that is 1% less than a decade ago. That percentage will continue to decrease as the rate of change due to global warming has become dramatic.

    Glaciers are so iconic in Iceland that when one collapses, people hold a funeral. 

    It’s a ceremony created for humans to make people aware about the urgency of global warming. And it’s a poetic way of marking the end of one of nature’s most inspiring creations.

    A land where ice is prized

    The first funeral for a glacier took place in 2019. It was for Okjökull glacier, the smallest glacier in a land that is dominated by ice and snow. 

    Okjökull glacier, popularly known as Ok, was only a modest 15 square kilometres big and had been shrinking for decades. Icelanders regarded diminutive Ok with affection, even making it a character in children’s book. 

    So the emotional impact of watching Ok vanish was felt not only by the locals who had grown up with the glacier, but across Iceland. Icelanders are brought up learning songs and sagas about their spectacular island. The snowpack of their glaciers creates the wild rolling rivers and massive waterfalls throughout the island before the flow tumbles into the stormy North Atlantic.

    Now on the hill which had been covered by Okjökull is a rock with a brass plate with urgent words from Icelandic poet Andri Snær Magnason.

    A LETTER TO THE FUTURE

    Vatnajökull ice cap and parts of Hofsjökull ice cap, Iceland in September 2022. (Credit: Pierre Markuse via Wikimedia Commons)

    Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path.
    This monument is to acknowledge that we know
    what is happening and what needs to be done.
    Only you will know if we did it.

    Ice loss in Iceland

    Tiny Okjökull was nothing compared to the largest glacier in Iceland — and in Europe — the Vatnajökull ice cap.

    Despite its mass, scientists estimate that nine million litres of Vatnajökull’s glacial ice are being turned into water every minute. 

    The lakes and ice lagoons downstream of Vatnajökull, filled by meltwater, are bigger every year as the glacier itself shrinks.

    So should there be funerals for glaciers?

    Sigurdur Arni Thordarson, the pastor of Hallgrímskirkja Church in Iceland thinks so. His church was built to resemble the mountains and glaciers of Iceland and dominates the Reykjavík skyline.

    “For humans, the loss of a glacier is a real loss,” Thordarson said. “People who have a deep understanding and awareness of interconnectedness of life really feel the necessity of expressing the grief.”

    Snow melt in the Alps

    It seems a widespread sentiment. A few months after the ceremony in Iceland, hikers, many dressed in black, gathered on Pizol glacier in the Swiss Alps to listen as a priest gave a funeral service. 

    Another ceremony followed in 2020 for Clark Glacier in Oregon and soon after on a Mexican glacier named Ayoloco by the Aztecs. The Mexican geologists and ecologists who marked the day used the words written by Andri Snær Magnason that commemorate Okjökull.

    Crossing into another culture, Buddhists monks in Nepal held an ‘ice funeral’ in the Himalayas in May 2025 for Yala Glacier which had shrunk by two thirds in the past several decades. Attended by locals and climate scientists they gathered under traditional prayer flags across from the last visible ice. Even Yala’s altitude over 5,000 metres was no protection against deglaciation

    Two granite stones now mark the spot of the ceremony. One with the words of Magnason from Iceland, the other with an inscription from Nepali poet Manjushree Thapa:

    Hallgrimskirkja Church

    Hallgrímskirkja Church in Reykjavík, Iceland. (Credit: Mattias Hill via Wikimedia Commons)

    Yala, where the gods dream high in the mountains, where the cold is divine.
    Dream of life in rock, sediment, and snow, in the pulverizing ofice and earth, in meltwater pools the colour of sky. 
    Dream. Dream of a glacier and the civilizations downstream.

    In all these commemorations, Magnason’s alarm from Iceland have been echoed:

    …We know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you will know if we did it.

    The Third Pole

    The glaciers in the Himalayas are sometimes called the ‘Third Pole’ because they account for the most ice after the Arctic and Antarctica. 

    Around the world glaciers are melting faster than ever recorded but the Himalayas are warming at a higher rate than the global average, up to 65% faster. The Himalaya glaciers feed some of the great rivers of Asia — the Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra and Yangtze rivers which flow through some of the most populated areas on the planet. 

    The consequences of disappearing glaciers are starting to be felt. Mexican climate scientists who attended the Ayoloco ceremony pointed out that “without large ice masses on mountain peaks temperatures will increase.”

    All of our planet was created by massive geologic forces. Those forces are more easily observable in Iceland, being one of the newest land masses to be created on Earth. It is an island nation that was created by volcanoes but sculpted and defined by glaciers. It may be fitting that, in addition to the first glacier funeral ever held, the first Glacier Graveyard was created in 2024, to mark extinct glaciers and provide a reminder of what is at stake. 

    The glaciers remembered were taken from the first Global Glacier Casualty List. Soon after, the United Nations declared 2025 the International Year of Glacier Preservation. Now, all fifteen tombstones carved from ice to mark those vanished glaciers have melted.

     

    Questions to consider: 

    1. Should glaciers, like some rivers which have been granted legal rights, be regarded as living creatures?

    2. Does a ceremony like a funeral provide an inspiration for climate activism?

    3. What natural formations or environmental places are important to you? 

     

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  • My Goodbye to Trent University – THE STUDENT LIFE BLOG

    My Goodbye to Trent University – THE STUDENT LIFE BLOG

    Photos and written by Amy Bridges

                This post is not only my goodbye to the 2021-2022 year but my goodbye to the blog and Trent University. The winter semester was my last semester of my B.A. which also means it was my last semester at Trent University. My experience at Trent University has been a long hard journey.

                I knew that my decision to go to university was going to change my life but I did not realize how much. Choosing Trent University was one of the best decisions of my life. While at Trent I was able to find my passion and gain the confidence to follow it, meet people who have made a huge impact on my life and was even able to gain experiences I wouldn’t have anywhere else.  

                In my four years at Trent, I have changed majors, went on an archaeological dig, gained experience working in a museum, worked for a professor and for 2 other departments in the university, moved apartments, had one of the worst seizures of my life, dealt with a pandemic, and was accepted to a Masters program. It has been a rollercoaster of an experience but I would not have traded it in for anything. These last four years have been challenging but the most rewarding.

    Even though I have been finished classes and set to graduate for a couple of weeks now I am still conflicted about leaving Trent. I am excited to be finished and I am proud of what I have accomplished, but I am sad that it means I will be leaving Trent and that I won’t be seeing the same people every week. Moving onto U of T for my Masters is going to be an exciting next step but terrifying at the same time.

                As I struggle with saying goodbye to Trent, I am also saying goodbye to this blog. This will be my last post on The Student Life Blog. I have been writing for the blog for 3 out of the 4 years I have been at Trent. I will be handing off the blog to another writer and in September you will be able to continue your journey at Trent with them. I am sure they will love this blog as much as I have over the past 3 years and I look forward to seeing where this blog goes in the future. Thank you for reading!

    Colour outside the lines,

    Amy Bridges 

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