Tag: whats

  • What’s in the new Office for Students strategy?

    What’s in the new Office for Students strategy?

    The Office for Students began a consultation process on its 2025-30 strategy back in December 2024. Alongside the usual opportunities for written responses there have been a series of “feedback events” promoted specifically to higher education provider staff, FE college staff, and students and student representatives held early in 2025.

    In the past OfS has faced arguably justified criticism for failing to take sector feedback on proposals into account – but we should take heart that there are significant differences between what was originally proposed and what has just been finalised and published.

    Graphic design is our passion

    Most strikingly, we are presented with four new attitudes that we are told will “drive delivery of all our strategic goals in the interest of students” – to hammer the point home individual activities in the “roadmap” are labelled with coloured, hexagonal, markers where “a particular activity will exemplify certain attitudes”. We get:

    • Ambitious for all students from all backgrounds (an upward arrow in a pink hexagon)
    • Collaborative in pursuit of our priorities and in our stewardship of the sector (two stylised hands in the shape of a heart, yellow hexagon)
    • Vigilant about safeguarding public money and student fees (A pound-sign on a teal hexagonal background)
    • Vocal that higher education is a force for good, for individuals, communities and the country (a stylised face and soundwave on a purple hexagon)

    Where things get potentially confusing is that the three broadly unchanged strategic goals – quality (tick, yellow circle), sector resilience (shield, blue circle), student experience and support (someone carrying an iPad, red circle) – are underpinned both by the attitude and the concept of “equality of opportunity” (teal ourobouros arrow). The only change at this conceptual level is that “the wider student interest” is characterised as “experience and support”. Don’t worry – the subsections of these are the same as in the consultations

    Fundamentally, OfS’ design language is giving openness and transparency, with a side order of handholding through what amounts to a little bit of a grab-bag of a list of interventions. The list is pared down from the rather lengthy set of bullet points initially presented, and there are some notable changes.

    Quality

    In the quality section what has been added is an assurance that OfS will do this “in collaboration with students, institutions, and sector experts”, and a commitment to “celebrate and share examples of excellence wherever we find them”. These are of course balanced with the corresponding stick: “Where necessary, we will pursue investigation and enforcement, using the full range of our powers.” This comes alongside clarification that the new quality system would be build on, rather than alongside the TEF.

    What is gone is the Quality Risk Register. An eminently sensible addition to the OfS armoury of risk registers, the vibes from the consultation were that providers were concerned that it might become another arm of regulation rather than a helpful tool for critical reflection

    Also absent from the final strategy is any mention of exploring alignment with European quality standards, which featured in the consultation materials. Similarly, the consultation’s explicit commitment to bring transnational education into the integrated quality model has not been restated – it’s unclear whether this reflects a change in priority or simply different drafting choices.

    Students

    In the section on students, language about consumer rights is significantly softened, with much more on supporting students in understanding their rights and correspondingly less on seeking additional powers to intervene on these issues. Notably absent are the consultation’s specific commitments – the model student contract, plans for case-report publication, and reciprocal intelligence sharing. The roadmap leans heavily into general “empowerment” language rather than concrete regulatory tools. And, for some reason, language on working with the Office for the Independent Adjudicator has disappeared entirely.

    A tweak to language clarifies that OfS are no longer keen to regulate around extra-curricular activity – there will be “non-regulatory” approaches however.

    New here is a commitment to “highlight areas of concern or interest that may not be subject to direct regulation but which students tell us matter to them”. The idea here looks to be that OfS can support institutions to respond proactively working with sector agencies and other partners. It is pleasing to see a commitment to this kind of information sharing (I suspect this is where OIA has ended up) – though a commitment to continue to collect and publish data on the prevalence of sexual misconduct in the draft appears not to have made the final cut.

    Resilience

    The “navigation of an environment of increased financial and strategic risks” has been a key priority of OfS over most of the year since this strategy was published – and what’s welcome here is clearer drafting and a positive commitment to working with providers to improve planning for potential closures, and that OfS will “continue to work with the government to address the gaps in the system that mean that students cannot be adequately protected if their institution can no longer operate”.

    Governance – yes, OfS will not only consider an enhanced focus, it will strengthen its oversight on governance. That’s strategic action right there. Also OfS will “work with government on legislative solutions that would stop the flow of public money when we [OfS, DfE, SLC] have concerns about its intended use.”

    Also scaled back is the consultation’s programmatic approach to governance reform. Where the consultation linked governance capability explicitly to equality and experience outcomes, the final version frames this primarily as assurance and capability support rather than a reform agenda. The shift suggests OfS moving toward a lighter-touch, collaborative posture on governance rather than directive intervention.

    Regulation

    OfS will now “strive to deliver exemplary regulation”, and interestingly the language on data has shifted from securing “modern real-time data” to “embedding the principle collect once, use many times” and a pleasing promise to work with other regulators and agencies to avoid duplication.

    Two other consultation commitments have been quietly downgraded. The explicit language on working with Skills England to develop a shared view of higher education’s role in meeting regional and national skills needs has disappeared – odd given the government’s focus on this agenda. And while the Teaching Excellence Framework remains present, the consultation’s push to make TEF “more routine and more widespread” has been cooled – the final version steps back from any commitments on cadence or coverage.

    What’s missing within the text of the strategy, despite being in the consultation version, are the “I statements” – these are what Debbie McVitty characterised on Wonkhe as:

    intended to describe what achieving its strategic objectives will look and feel like for students, institutions, taxpayers and employers in a clear and accessible way, and are weighted towards students, as the “primary beneficiaries” of the proposed strategy.

    These have been published, but separately and with a few minor revisions. Quite what status they have is unclear:

    The ‘I statements’ are a distillation of our objectives, as set out in our strategy. They are not regulatory tools. We will not track the performance of universities and colleges against them directly.

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  • What’s in the post-16 white paper for postgraduate study?

    What’s in the post-16 white paper for postgraduate study?

    The term “postgraduate” appears exactly 14 times in the Post-16 Education and Skills white paper : a clear improvement over 2021s Skills for Jobs (a mere two mentions in the appendix) and one more than 2016s Success as a Knowledge Economy (the one with the actual postgraduate student loans).

    So it looks like, more so than I’d personally have expected, “post-16” really does include “postgraduate” for once. But what does that mean?

    Fees & maintenance

    The obvious place to start is with the big headline: the planned increase to maximum tuition fees in the next two parliaments and the legislation to enable this to happen automatically thereafter. There’s also the (re)commitment to increase maintenance loans each year (I’ll leave Jim to explain what’s wrong with that).

    None of this really impacts postgraduate Masters and PhD students. Masters loans will also continue to increase with forecast inflation, but fees aren’t regulated and still aren’t properly monitored, despite promises to do so in 2016. PhD fees are largely shaped by the size of UKRI studentships, about which more below.

    I do think it’s interesting to consider what these undergraduate changes will do to perceptions of postgraduate fees. Will the cost of an MA or MSc provoke less sticker shock once BA and BSc fees (very quickly) cross the £10k rubicon? Or will greater undergraduate student loan debt make another £13k or so for a Masters feel less palatable?

    Personally, I think this stuff could end up mattering a lot, particularly if the government wants to improve postgraduate participation. Which apparently it does.

    Postgraduate participation

    We’re told that the government will “for the first time seek to address the barriers faced by disadvantaged students in accessing and succeeding at postgraduate level.”

    It’s fascinating to think about what this actually means.

    On access right now, little is known and less is done. There are some pockets of committed good work, often spotlighted here on Wonkhe and often supported by organisations like UKCGE (who I’m pleased to see will be funded to develop their involvement). But I can still point to data across our platforms demonstrating that postgraduate participation often looks very different to postgraduate interest.

    Postgraduate success, meanwhile, isn’t included in OfS B3 metrics and there’s still no postgraduate TEF. That means that, whilst continuation to a Masters records a good outcome for a university, progression from there isn’t really evaluated. The closest we have is LEO, which, though cited as “one of the best data sources” to drive informed student choices, is a crude and lagged metric taking no account of someone’s background.

    But what’s most intriguing is that all of this appears in relation to Access and Participation Plans.

    APPs determine a university’s ability to charge the higher undergraduate fee level. Postgraduate fees aren’t regulated, which leads to some of the mess around postgraduate funding. What’s here clearly isn’t a proposal to start scrutinising and intervening around PG fees but – like several other parts of the white paper – talking in this way is a potential step towards fundamental change.

    Home-grown PGR

    The white paper actually has a lot more to say about PhDs than it does about Masters degrees. Here’s where we find the most specific references to barriers faced by disadvantaged students and to challenges faced within specific subject areas.

    Here’s also where we find repeated references to a ‘home grown’ pipeline for UK research talent. Again, this is an interesting distinction to make. One of the few major interventions in PhD funding in recent years was the decision to open 30 per cent of UKRI studentships to international applicants from 2021. It hasn’t had a big impact on enrolments but it has meant more students – of all origins – competing for the same broad pot.

    The specific policy is light here (lots of verbs like ‘explore’ and ‘consider’) but prioritising domestic PhDs leads naturally to thinking about interventions around domestic funding.

    Elsewhere there are much clearer and very positive changes to medical and parental leave for UKRI-funded PhD students. This is explicitly framed as bringing conditions in line with employment law and therefore a step towards recognising that PhD students aren’t just students. Of course, this only applies directly to the relatively small proportion of students funded by UKRI.

    Post 16 postgraduate

    This is the first white paper in around ten years with a meaningful amount to say about postgraduate study. It does seem to understand what some of the key problems are and it seems to appreciate that PG is part of a joined-up system.

    There are other questions to ask – there’s little on Masters study and the perverse quirk of the international fee levy robbing PG to pay for UG feels worth scrutinising – but for once the government is asking questions about PG too. That is a good thing.

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  • What’s Working and Where Further Reform Is Needed

    What’s Working and Where Further Reform Is Needed

    As part of National Transfer Student Week, hundreds of college campuses are hosting public celebrations to uplift their transfer student communities, including many in our home state of California. While these celebrations are important to increase visibility and a sense of belonging, transfer students warrant our attention and support year-round. The data demonstrate why: While 80 percent of community college students nationally aspire to earn a bachelor’s degree, just 17 percent of community college students in California reach that finish line within six years. Moreover, sizable inequities by race and ethnicity, income, and age point to the need for drastic change.

    As former transfer students from the California Community Colleges who have worked in various capacities to improve transfer, including working directly with students through admissions, partnering with higher education system leaders to implement statewide legislation like Assembly Bill 928 and educating lawmakers and system leaders on the gaps that persist as policy fellows with the Campaign for College Opportunity, we know these challenges firsthand. Reflecting on our own transfer journeys and professional experience, we have identified three priorities that must be addressed to improve transfer student outcomes.

    1. Align and streamline transfer pathways to create flexibility for learners.

    When we began our community college journeys, we had no idea where the road might lead us: to a California State University, a University of California or a private nonprofit institution. Like many first-time students, we explored our options and built contingency plans. Yet California’s transfer pathways are not designed to provide such flexibility. Eligibility requirements vary across systems, with CSU and UC maintaining their own preferred pathways.

    Adding complexity, individual campuses and academic programs also impose local requirements, as documented in a recent study of five public institutions in California. This means that the same community college class can be treated differently by every campus, even in the same system, and may not end up applying to the intended major. As Just Equations further documented, the campus- and major-specific requirements are especially complicated for math.

    To avoid wasting time and credits, transfer students must commit early to a specific path. Making sense of these requirements, however, falls largely on students. One resource that helped us navigate course transfer in California is ASSIST.org. Nancy was able to use this tool to decide that the flexibility afforded by the general education transfer curriculum recognized by all CSU and UC campuses would be the best path for her. Meanwhile, both Brianna and Carlos relied on the tool to understand which math classes to take for their intended majors. Brianna discovered that the business calculus class she planned to take at American River College would work at her target CSU campus but would disqualify her from every UC campus.

    Unfortunately, while tools exist, students must independently seek them out and interpret complex rules. This adds unnecessary stress and risk of error. While we each ultimately succeeded in transferring and graduating, too many students are thrown off course. California should cut through this confusion by better aligning curricular requirements across the CSU and UC, and across campuses in the same system, so students have breathing room.

    1. Expand access to accurate and timely advising.

    While students in specialized programs often receive consistent advising, all community college students would benefit from personalized, ongoing support. Advising was pivotal for each of us, but only after we made the effort to seek it out and build relationships.

    For Nancy, proactively meeting with a transfer counselor every semester at El Camino College ensured that her general education plan and major requirements stayed on track. Brianna initially struggled to connect with advisers, but after joining her college’s track team, she began working with a consistent counselor who understood her long-term goals and helped her recognize that her coursework qualified her for several associate degrees.

    Through EOPS and athletics, Carlos met with his counselors multiple times each semester to monitor his progress on his plan to transfer to UCLA for economics. Despite his persistence, he was not informed of the calculus prerequisites until a year into his studies, which delayed his graduation from Porterville College. This gap was not the result of inaction on his part but of advising structures that are too underresourced to keep up with the ever-changing terrain of major requirements and hidden prerequisites.

    Together, our experiences highlight both the promise and pitfalls of advising. Consistent guidance turned potential setbacks into opportunities, but these outcomes depended on resources and relationships that are not universally accessible. California can and must do better by guaranteeing timely, accurate advising from the start. That means staffing campuses with sufficient transfer counselors, ensuring continuity with the same adviser, embedding transfer-specific advising across programs, as well as transfer receiving institutions investing more into their future students before the application process begins.

    1. Invest in transfer success and building transfer-receptive cultures.

    Admission to a four-year institution is only the beginning of the transfer journey. Just like first-year students, transfer students need resources and communities to thrive at an entirely new school and system. For Nancy and Carlos, UCLA’s Transfer Summer Program provided an early introduction to key campus resources and a strong peer community. That foundation smoothed their transition and reinforced their sense of belonging. With one in three UC undergraduates entering as transfer students, investing systemwide in transfer-specific programming is essential. Summer bridge programs, structured mentorship and visible campus traditions can ensure transfer students feel valued from the first day they enter campus.

    By contrast, Brianna entered Pomona College as one of just 20 transfer students. While living with fellow transfer students helped build community, formal support was limited. She stepped up as a student leader, serving as the first transfer community residential adviser and partnering with university leaders to design and implement transfer-specific programming.

    These stories illustrate both the power of institutionalizing support services and of recognizing the inherent assets that transfer students bring to the table, because building a transfer-receptive culture must begin with valuing transfer students and treating them as integral contributors to the intellectual and social life of their campuses.

    Looking Ahead

    Our transfer success stories were possible because of our persistence in seeking tools like ASSIST.org, the guidance of dedicated advisers and the support of peer communities that helped us navigate through an unduly complex and high-stakes process. But no student’s success should depend on luck—our higher education systems need to make sure they are student-ready. California has made important progress through reforms like common course numbering, the Associate Degree for Transfer and Cal-GETC. Now it is time to build on that momentum by aligning and streamlining pathways, expanding access to accurate advising and degree planning tools, and investing in transfer-receptive campuses. 

    Brianna Huynh is a former policy fellow at the Campaign for College Opportunity. She is completing her M.S. in mathematics at California State Polytechnic University Pomona, and holds an A.S.T. in mathematics from American River College and a B.S. in mathematics from Pomona College. 

    Nancy Ohia is a current policy fellow at the Campaign for College Opportunity. After graduating from UCLA as a transfer student, Nancy earned her M.P.P. from USC. 

    Carlos Rodriguez is a current policy fellow at the Campaign for College Opportunity. He earned his A.S. in business management from Porterville College and is a current transfer student at UCLA majoring in economics. 

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  • How D.C. Public Schools Are Reimagining What’s Possible for Every Student – The 74

    How D.C. Public Schools Are Reimagining What’s Possible for Every Student – The 74


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    Every morning in the District of Columbia, nearly 100,000 students step into 251 public schools with hopes and ambitions for their future. After years of pandemic disruption, recent results show clear signs of progress in how students are recovering and advancing.

    In our roles as deputy mayor for education and state superintendent, we see something remarkable taking shape — a citywide education system leading the nation in how to reimagine what’s possible for every child.

    This year’s statewide assessment results tell a clear story of momentum. On the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment of Progress in Education, students made the largest gains in English Language Arts and math proficiency since the pandemic. Forty percent of schools raised proficiency by at least 5 points in one of these subjects, and more than 60% showed measurable progress in both. Across the city, 137 of 223 tested schools boosted English scores, while 141 schools improved in math.

    ELA proficiency has now surpassed pre-COVID levels, increasing from 37.5% in 2019 to 37.6% in 2025. Math proficiency reached a record high since COVID, rising from 19.4% in 2022 to 26.4% this year. This is evidence that students are not only recovering, but moving forward at a faster pace than before the pandemic.

    National data confirms this progress. The Harvard Center for Education Policy and Research’s 2024 Education Recovery Scorecard ranked D.C. first in the nation for learning recovery in both math and reading for grades 3 to 8 between 2022 and 2024. In that two-year period, D.C. students gained back the equivalent of half a grade level in math and a quarter of a grade level in reading. Just a few years ago, D.C. ranked 32nd in math recovery since 2019; today, it leads the country.

    Federal relief dollars helped make this possible. D.C. received more than $600 million in K-12 pandemic recovery funds, about $6,800 per student — nearly double the national average of $3,700. Research shows that targeting these dollars toward tutoring, summer learning and other evidence-based strategies contributed directly to the rebound.

    Together, these results demonstrate what families and educators across the city already feel in classrooms: Students are making meaningful, historic gains in learning.

    Several factors are driving this progress. Since 2015, local per-student funding has increased from $16,032 to $28,040 — a 75% rise — with more money provided for serving students with the greatest needs.

    D.C.’s early education stands above national enrollment levels, with 95% of 4-year-olds and 82% of 3-year-olds citywide enrolled in pre-K. At the high school level, more students are graduating in four years than in 2010-11, with nearly a 20- point increase since 2010-11, growing from 58.6% to 76.1%. These students now graduate with college credits, industry certifications and real-world experience in high-demand fields through career and technical Education programs, dual enrollment and our growing network of citywide Advanced Technical Centers, preparing them for success in their next chapter.

    The Education Through Employment Pathways initiative enables the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education to connect data from pre-K-12 with postsecondary outcomes to better identify which programs propel students forward in college and careers, helping D.C. make future investments accordingly.

    Teachers are a cornerstone of this progress. Thanks to big investments in recent years, D.C. Public School educators now earn an average salary of $109,000, among the highest in the nation, with comparable pay in charter schools. Investments in professional development, coaching, structured literacy training, high-quality instructional materials in literacy and math and high-impact tutoring have also helped to strengthen classroom instruction, so students feel challenged, supported and inspired. At the same time, D.C. is tackling barriers outside the classroom, securing school-based mental health supports, providing safe passage to schools and expanding the District’s Out of School Time programming. As a result, chronic absenteeism overall has declined 18.3% between 2021-22 and 2023-24, while profound chronic absenteeism — a student missing 30% or more of school days — is down 34.2% over the same time period. 

    The vast majority of families receive one of their top choices of district and charter schools through a universal enrollment lottery, helping drive D.C.’s national leadership in parent satisfaction. This system, combined with investments in quality and variety, has helped drive the city’s sustained enrollment growth since the 2008-09 school year and added more than 5,000 students after COVID. This is at a time when many large districts across the country experienced declines.

    D.C.’s education success isn’t just about test scores. It’s about the child who now walks into class with confidence because tutoring makes reading click. It’s about the high schooler graduating with a resume that includes a paid internship and college credits already earned. It’s about showing the nation that D.C. students — no matter their background or income — can succeed at the highest levels.

    D.C.’s experience shows how large urban education systems can rebound and thrive when funding is deep and sustained, resources meet student needs, teachers are well supported and compensated, and learning starts early.

    While challenges remain, the data show encouraging momentum that is worth studying nationally. D.C.’s educational vision invariably focuses on ensuring every child is prepared for higher education and a family-sustaining career, while making certain that the city continues to be the nation’s talent capital.

    D.C.’s public education leaders can keep proving to the nation what happens when a city dreams big for every student, invests strategically and stays the course: Students and schools will surpass expectations.

    Paul Kihn is deputy mayor for education in the District of Columbia. Dr. Antoinette Mitchell is state superintendent of education for the District of Columbia.


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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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  • What’s So Conservative About Civics, Anyway? (opinion)

    What’s So Conservative About Civics, Anyway? (opinion)

    Amid rising political violence, the need for nonpartisan civic education has never been clearer. Yet saying, “civic thought” or “civic life and leadership” now reads conservative. Should it?

    With the backing of a legislature his party dominated, Republican governor Doug Ducey created Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership in 2016. Both SCETL and its founding director, Paul Carrese, are now understood as key leaders in a movement for civic schools and centers.

    In a March 2024 special issue on civic engagement in the journal Laws, Caresse outlines a deepening American civic crisis, including as evidence, “the persistent appeal of the demagogic former President Donald Trump.”

    He’s not exactly carrying water for the MAGA movement.

    Whether MAGA should be considered conservative is part of the puzzle. If by “conservative” we mean an effort to honor that which has come before us, to preserve that which is worth preserving and to take care when stepping forward, civic education has an inherently conservative lineage.

    But even if we dig back more than a half century, it can be difficult to disentangle the preservation of ideals from the practices of partisanship. The Institute for Humane Studies was founded in the early 1960s to promote classical liberalism, including commitments to individual freedom and dignity, limited government, and the rule of law. It has been part of George Mason University since 1985, receiving millions from the Charles Koch Foundation.

    Earlier this year, IHS president and CEO Emily Chamlee-Wright asserted that President Trump’s “tariff regime isn’t just economically harmful—it reverses the moral and political logic that made trade a foundation of the American experiment.” Rather than classifying that column through a partisan lens, we might consider a more expansive query: Is it historically accurate and analytically robust? Does it help readers understand intersections among the rule of law, individual freedom and dignity?

    The editors at Persuasion, which ran the column, certainly would seem to think so. But Persuasion also has a bent toward “a free society,” “free speech” and “free inquiry,” and against “authoritarian populism.” The founder, Yascha Mounk, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, has been a persistent center-left critic of what he and others deem the excesses of the far left. Some of the challenges they enumerate made it into Steven Pinker’s May opinion piece in The New York Times, in which Pinker defended Harvard’s overwhelming contributions to global humanity while also admitting to instances of political narrowness; Pinker wrote that a poll of his colleagues “turned up many examples in which they felt political narrowness had skewed research in their specialties.” Has political narrowness manifested within the operating assumptions of the civic engagement movement?

    Toward the beginning of this century, award-winning researchers Joel Westheimer and Joseph Kahne pushed for a social change–oriented civic education. Writing in 2004, in the American Educational Research Journal, they described their predispositions as such: “We find the exclusive emphasis on personally responsible citizenship when estranged from analysis of social, political, and economic contexts … inadequate for advancing democracy. There is nothing inherently democratic about the traits of a personally responsible citizen … From our perspective, traits associated with participatory and justice oriented citizens, on the other hand, are essential.”

    Other scholars have also pointed to change as an essential goal of civic education. In 1999, Thomas Deans provided an overview of the field of service learning and civic engagement. He noted dueling influences of John Dewey and Paulo Freire across the field, writing, “They overlap on several key characteristics essential to any philosophy of service-learning,” including “an anti-foundationalist epistemology” and “an abiding hope for social change through education combined with community action.”

    Across significant portions of the fields of education, service learning and community engagement, the penchant toward civic education as social change had become dominant by 2012, when I inhabited an office next to Keith Morton at Providence College. It had been nearly 20 years since Morton completed an empirical study of different modes of community service—charity, project and social change—finding strengths and integrity within each. By the time we spoke, Morton observed that much of the field had come to (mis)interpret his study as suggesting a preference for social change over project or charity work.

    While service learning and community engagement significantly embraced this progressive orientation, these pedagogies were also assumed to fulfill universities’ missional commitments to civic education. Yet the link between community-engaged learning and education for democracy was often left untheorized.

    In 2022, Carol Geary Schneider, president emerita of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, cited real and compounding fractures in U.S. democracy. Shortly thereafter in the same op-ed, Geary Schneider wrote, “two decades of research on the most common civic learning pedagogy—community-based projects completed as part of a ‘service learning’ course—show that student participation in service learning: 1) correlates with increased completion, 2) enhances practical skills valued by employers and 3) builds students’ motivation to help solve public problems.”

    All three of these outcomes are important, but to what end? The first serves university retention goals, the second supports student career prospects and the third contributes broadly to civic learning. Yet civic learning does not necessarily contribute to the knowledge, skills, attitudes and beliefs necessary to sustain American democracy.

    There is nothing inherently democratic about a sea of empowered individuals, acting in pursuit of their separate conceptions of the good. All manner of people do this, sometimes in pursuit of building more inclusive communities, and other times to persecute one another. Democratic culture, norms, laws and policies channel energies toward ends that respect individual rights and liberties.

    Democracy is not unrestrained freedom for all from all. It is institutional and cultural arrangements advancing individual opportunities for empowerment, tempered by an abiding respect for the dignity of other persons, grounded in the rule of law. Commitment to one another’s empowerment starts from that foundational assumption that all people are created equal. All other democratic rights and obligations flow from that well.

    Proponents of civic schools and centers have wanted to see more connections to foundational democratic principles and the responsibilities inherent in stewarding an emergent, intentionally aspirational democratic legacy.

    In a paper published by the American Enterprise Institute, Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey consider next steps for the movement advancing civic schools and centers, while also emphasizing responsibility-taking as part of democratic citizenship. They write, “By understanding our institutions of constitutional government, our characteristic political philosophy, and the history of American politics in practice as answers to the challenging, even paradoxical questions posed by the effort to govern ourselves, we enter into the perspective of responsibility—the citizen’s proper perspective as one who participates in sovereign oversight of, and takes responsibility for, the American political project. The achievement of such a perspective is the first object of civic education proper to the university.”

    This sounds familiar. During the Obama administration, the Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement National Task Force called for the “cultivation of foundational knowledge about fundamental principles and debates about democracy.” More than a half century before, the Truman Commission’s report on “Higher Education for American Democracy” declared, “In the past our colleges have perhaps taken it for granted that education for democratic living could be left to courses in history and political science. It should become instead a primary aim of all classroom teaching and, more important still, of every phase of campus life.” And in the era of the U.S. founding, expanding access to quality education was understood as central to the national, liberatory project of establishing and sustaining democratic self-government. Where does this leave us today?

    Based on more than 20 years of research, teaching and administration centered around civic education, at institutions ranging from community colleges to the Ivy League, I have six recommendations for democratic analysis, education and action to move beyond this hyperpartisan moment.

    1. Advance analysis rather than allegations. I started this essay with two critiques of President Trump advanced by leaders at centers ostensibly associated with conservativism. More recently I demonstrated alignments between current conservative appeals and civic aspirations under two popular Democratic presidents. We should spend far less time and ink debating whether something emerges from Republican or Democratic roots. Our proper roles as academics and as citizens direct us to consider specific policies and practices, to compare them historically and cross-nationally, and to gather evidence of impacts. We now have a landscape that includes more than a dozen new civic schools and centers. We therefore have opportunities to assess their differences, similarities and impact.
    2. Demonstrate that rights derive from shared governance. Work with students to understand the relationship between good government and everyday functions such as freedom to move, freedom to associate, freedom to contract and freedom to trade. These rights manifest through the promise made in the Declaration of Independence. “Governments are instituted,” it reads, “to effect … Safety and Happiness.” Danielle Allen’s Our Declaration is an indispensable aid in any such effort.
    3. Encourage historic political-economic comparisons of rights. Diving deep into history from all corners of the world clarifies various kinds of colonizing forces and diverse approaches to good government, from imperial China to the Persian Empire and American expansion. Last year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson, received the award for research demonstrating that societies with well-established rule of law and individual rights are more likely to become economically prosperous. Consider this and other, disciplinarily diverse explorations of the structural conditions for human flourishing. Push past dichotomizing narratives that sort history into tidy buckets. Rights as we know them—expanded and protected through state institutions—are tools of liberation with an extended, colonial and global heritage. Mounk’s podcast is an excellent resource for contemporary, comparative interrogation of the structures and cultural commitments that advance rights.
    4. Wrestle with power and violence. Despite national and global history riven with conflict and conquest, many progressives came to imagine that democracy is a given, that having rights in conditions of comparative peace is the natural state. Yet those rights only manifest through the disciplined commitments of state officials doing their jobs. In a recent article in Democracy, William A. Galston, a Brookings Institution senior fellow, professor at the University of Maryland and former Clinton administration official, suggests democracy is on the defensive because citizens too frequently “regard the movement toward tolerance at home and internationalism abroad as irreversible.” Nonsense, argues Galston. History shows us societies descend into evil, governments revoke liberties and armies invade. Democratic liberties are co-created political commitments. They have always depended upon judicious, democratic stewardship of policing power at home and military power abroad. Questioning state structures of enforcement should be part of university-level civic education, but so too should respecting them and understanding the reasons for their persistence. Here and throughout, civic education must balance respect for the past, its traditions and its empirical lessons, with possibilities for the future.
    5. Embrace and interrogate foundational democratic values. Meditate on the intentionally aspirational commitment to American democracy, embodied in the assertion that all people are created equal. Nurture the virtue of respect for others implied by inherent equality. Foster—in yourself and in your students—an embrace of human dignity so strong that you seek bridging opportunities across the American experiment, working to find the best in others, seeking connections with individuals who seem most unlike you. Even if they offer no reciprocity, never forget any person’s basic humanity. Before analyzing or convincing, listen and find ways to listen well beyond your normal circles. My colleague at the University of Pennsylvania Lia Howard is modeling such efforts with systematic approaches to democratic listening across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
    6. Most of all, if principled, rigorous, honest analysis beyond partisan dichotomizing appeals to you, know that you are not alone. Danielle Allen (Harvard University), Kwame Anthony Appiah (New York University) and Eboo Patel (Interfaith America) lead among numerous scholars and organizers refreshing democratic ideals for our era. They demonstrate that democracy does not manifest without attention to our shared heritage, our collective institutions and our willingness to respect one another. They hold a pragmatic space between civic education as unquestioning nation-building on one extreme and as unmoored social justice activism on another. Readers curious about their approaches can begin with Allen presenting “How to Be a Confident Pluralist” at Brigham Young University, Appiah making a cosmopolitan case for human dignity and humility in The New York Times Magazine, and Patel in conversation with American University president Jonathan Alger in AU’s “Perspectives on the Civic Life” series.

    This essay, it must be noted, was almost entirely completed before the political assassination of Charlie Kirk. It now becomes even clearer that we must identify ways to analyze beyond partisan pieties while embracing human dignity. Some leaders are reminding us of our ideals. Utah governor Spencer Cox’s nine minutes on ending political violence deserves a listen. Ezra Klein opened his podcast with a reflection on the meaning of the assassination, followed by his characteristic modeling of principled disagreement with a political opponent (in this case, Ben Shapiro). It is the second feature of that Klein podcast—extended periods of exploration, disagreement and brief periods of consensus regarding critical democratic questions—that we must see more of across campuses and communities. One of the worst possible, and unfortunately plausible, outcomes of this movement for civic schools and centers could be the continuing balkanization of campuses into self-sorted identity-based communities, with very little cross-pollination. That would be bad for learning and for our country.

    Whatever the political disposition of civic centers or other programs across campus, we need more and better cross-campus commitment to democratic knowledge, values and beliefs if we wish to continue and strengthen the American democratic tradition.

    Eric Hartman is a senior fellow and director of the executive doctorate in higher education management at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.

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  • What’s Next for Texas A&M?

    What’s Next for Texas A&M?

    When Texas A&M University president Mark Welsh resigned amid an academic freedom controversy last week, he became the institution’s second leader to step down due to scandal in two years.

    Unlike his predecessor, Kathy Banks, who retired in 2023 after she was caught lying about a hiring scandal, Welsh remained popular on campus; faculty sent the Board of Regents letters of support last week following a controversy that prompted him to fire an instructor, and students rallied on his behalf. But he seemed to lose the support of the deep-red Texas Legislature: Several Republican lawmakers called for his dismissal after a discussion over gender identity between a student and a professor in a children’s literature class was captured on video and quickly went viral.

    In the short video, which has racked up more than five million views, a student questions whether an instructor is legally allowed to teach that there is more than one gender, which she suggests is “against our president’s laws.” Welsh initially defended the professor but quickly folded under considerable pressure from lawmakers, firing her and removing two administrators from their duties because they “approved plans to continue teaching course content that was not consistent” with the course’s description, he said in a Sept. 9 statement.

    Amid the fallout, the American Association of University Professors and free speech groups accused Texas A&M of stifling academic freedom and bending to conservative political pressure. (Welsh countered that the case wasn’t about academic freedom but “academic responsibility.”)

    But the incident also raises questions about what comes next for Texas A&M after legislators accused Welsh—a retired four-star general and former chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force—of spreading “leftist [diversity, equity and inclusion] and transgender indoctrination.”

    A Mixed Reaction

    Welsh largely skirted the controversy in a statement released Friday, his last day on the job.

    “When I was first appointed as President of Texas A&M University, I told then Chancellor John Sharp and our Board of Regents that I would serve as well as I possibly could until it was time for someone else to take over,” he wrote. “Over the past few days, it’s become clear that now is that time.”

    He added that serving as president for two years had been “an incredible privilege” and a “remarkable gift” and praised Texas A&M faculty, staff and students in his parting statement. On campus Friday, hundreds of supporters greeted Welsh outside an administrative building, according to social media and local coverage. The Texas A&M Student Government Association encouraged students and others to gather to “express gratitude” for Welsh’s service.

    While Welsh’s parting remarks were restrained, state legislators and faculty members have been more passionate—and outraged—as both groups look ahead to the coming presidential search.

    Leonard Bright, interim president of the Texas A&M AAUP chapter, told Inside Higher Ed that many faculty members had mixed feelings about Welsh. On the one hand, many professors viewed him as a stable leader who had served the university well since his time as dean of the Bush School of Government and Public Service, which he led from 2016 until he was appointed interim president in July 2023, before being given the permanent job later that year.

    On the other hand, Welsh’s dismissal of English instructor Melissa McCoul, the professor caught up in the gender ideology flap, raised questions about whether he would protect academic freedom. As Bright sees it, when Welsh’s job was threatened, he failed to stand up for academic freedom.

    Bright added that he was somewhat surprised by Welsh’s resignation, arguing that “as horrible” as the president’s recent actions were, he thought they had appeased the conservative critics and that “the board did not want to create further upheaval” given recent turnover at the top.

    But ultimately, only Welsh’s resignation would satisfy his fiercest critics.

    Brian Harrison, a Republican lawmaker and Texas A&M graduate, noted in posts on X following Welsh’s resignation that he had been calling for the board to fire the president for nine months.

    “Proud and honored to be the voice for millions of Texans who are fed up with being taxed out of their homes so their government can weaponize their money against them, their values, and their children by funding DEI and transgender indoctrination,” Harrison wrote on X on Friday.

    An LGBTQ+ Crackdown?

    Like all institutions in the state, Texas A&M has backed away from DEI as instructed by state law. But Welsh’s removal of McCoul for discussing gender identity in class is part of a broader retreat by Texas A&M from LGBTQ+ topics. That effort dates back to at least 2021, according to one anonymous source who previously told Inside Higher Ed they were discouraged from promoting LGBTQ+ materials in the university library’s collection when Banks was president.

    Last year Texas A&M cut its LGBTQ studies minor, alongside other low-enrollment programs, after Harrison led a charge against the program, calling it “liberal indoctrination.”

    Both the flagship and the Texas A&M system have also taken aim at drag shows.

    Texas A&M defunded an annual student drag show without explanation in 2022. West Texas A&M University president Walter Wendler canceled a student drag show in 2023, claiming it was demeaning to women. Earlier this year, the Texas A&M University system Board of Regents passed a resolution banning drag shows across all 11 campuses, only to get hit with a First Amendment lawsuit; a judge ruled against the system in March on free speech grounds.

    (Neither Texas A&M University or system officials responded to a request for comment.)

    Texas Hiring Trends

    With Welsh out of office, Texas A&M will soon begin a search for its next president. Chancellor Glenn Hegar announced Friday that an interim president will be named shortly, and in the meantime, James Hallmark, vice chancellor for academic affairs, will serve as acting president.

    Hegar, who has only been on the job since July, is a former Republican politician, one of several hired to lead a Texas system or university in recent months in what is shaping up to be a trend.

    Elsewhere in the state, the Texas Tech University system named Republican lawmaker Brandon Creighton as the sole finalist for the chancellor position. During his time in the Legislature, Creighton championed bills to crack down on DEI, restrict free speech at public institutions by banning expressive activities at night and undercut the power of faculty senates.

    The University of Texas at Austin also opted for a politico, hiring as president Jim Davis, former Texas deputy attorney general, who had worked in UT Austin’s legal division since 2018. Davis was promoted to the top job after a stint as interim president, a role he had held since February. Similarly, the UT system tapped former GOP lawmaker John Zerwas as its next chancellor.

    Recent hiring trends in Texas are beginning to mirror Florida, which has hired multiple former Republican lawmakers and other political figures with connections to Governor Ron DeSantis.

    As Texas A&M prepares to launch its search, faculty are calling for an open process.

    “The search should be transparent. It shouldn’t be primarily behind closed doors,” Bright said. “The faculty need to be involved. This is academia—this is about teaching, research and service.”

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  • What’s Next for Concussion and CTE Research?

    What’s Next for Concussion and CTE Research?

    The Higher Education Inquirer is calling on both the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to explain the suspension of the Concussion Assessment, Research and Education (CARE) Consortium, the largest concussion study in U.S. history. Since 2014, CARE has sought to illuminate the effects of concussion and repetitive head impact exposure (HIE) on student-athletes and military service members.

    A Decade of Groundbreaking Work

    Funded through an initial $30 million “Grand Alliance,” CARE enrolled more than 53,000 athletes and cadets and tracked over 5,500 diagnosed concussions across more than two dozen universities and four service academies. Its successive phases—CARE 1.0 (acute effects), CARE 2.0 (cumulative impacts), and CARE-SALTOS Integrated (long-term outcomes)—provided unprecedented insights into how concussions affect recovery, cognition, mood, sleep, and overall well-being.

    The CARE study generated more than 90 peer-reviewed publications, influencing safety protocols, athletic training practices, and public health debates in both NCAA settings and the U.S. military.

    CTE and the Need for Decades-Long Research

    The suspension comes at a critical moment. Concerns about chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE)—a degenerative brain disease linked to repetitive head trauma—are rising. Because CTE’s symptoms often surface decades after injuries, researchers emphasize that only long-term, continuous studies can reveal who develops CTE and why.

    Pausing or dismantling CARE risks losing continuity in precisely the kind of data needed to connect the dots between adolescent or collegiate injuries and late-life neurodegenerative conditions.

    Collateral Damage: Workers Left Behind

    The disruption of CARE has already produced casualties beyond lost data. At the University of Michigan, one of the leading CARE sites, about two dozen research workers were abruptly laid off. Without union protections, they had little recourse. This underscores how fragile large research consortia can be—dependent not only on grants and institutional goodwill, but also on a workforce often treated as disposable.

    These layoffs raise troubling questions: If the workers who made CARE possible are discarded without warning, what does that say about the broader commitment to athlete and cadet safety?

    Outstanding Questions for NCAA and DoD

    The Higher Education Inquirer is pressing for answers:

    • Why was CARE suspended? Was this due to funding shortfalls, shifting priorities, or political pressure?

    • Will existing data remain accessible? The CARE Consortium has been a vital contributor to the Federal Interagency Traumatic Brain Injury Research (FITBIR) database.

    • What about the workforce? Why were employees terminated without protections, and what obligations do the NCAA, DoD, and participating universities have to them?

    • What is the long-term plan for concussion research? Without decades-long studies, the risks of CTE and other late-life conditions will remain poorly understood.

    Big Loss for Athletes

    If CARE is permanently suspended, the consequences will extend far beyond academia. Athletes and cadets will lose a vital source of protection, science will lose irreplaceable data, and workers will continue to bear the costs of institutional indifference.

    The Higher Education Inquirer urges the NCAA and DoD to clarify CARE’s future and recommit to the kind of decades-long research that brain science demands. Anything less is a betrayal—to athletes, to service members, and to the very workers who made this research possible.

    Sources

    • NCAA. NCAA-DOD Grand Alliance: CARE Consortium. ncaa.org

    • CARE Consortium. About the Consortium. careconsortium.net

    • NCAA. NCAA and Department of Defense expand concussion study with $22.5 million. (October 31, 2018). ncaa.org

    • U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command. Research Supporting a Lifetime of Brain Injury. mrdc.health.mil

    • NIH. Concussion Assessment, Research, and Education Consortium (CARE) Study Data. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

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  • What’s coming up for HE policy in 2025–26

    What’s coming up for HE policy in 2025–26

    It was early November 2024 when Secretary of State for Education Bridget Philipson issued her edict to heads of institution in England, confirming the government’s plans to increase the undergraduate fee threshold to £9,535 from 2025–26, and setting out her five priorities for higher education.

    Ten months on and there remains not a great deal of additional flesh on those bones. The planned summer white paper on post-16 education and skills, incorporating HE reform, has been pushed to the autumn. In the interim, while the Office for Students (OfS) has stepped up its work on financial sustainability, it’s clear that the government is not minded to ride to the rescue of the sector at system level, whatever it might decide to do about financially challenged institutions.

    The Spending Review was accompanied by the announcement of a further squeeze on the Strategic Priorities Grant. The immigration white paper proposed a six per cent levy on international fees. The prospect of an ongoing annual inflationary fee threshold uplift remains unconfirmed. And the rollout of the Lifelong Learning Entitlement, while potentially paradigm-shifting in the long term, offers mostly short-term pain and expense for rather limited gains.

    This area is getting greyer

    Though ministers probably wouldn’t articulate it like this, at stake is the status of higher education as a “public realm” sector. It’s not currently politically or economically advantageous for government to be seen to take seriously the sector’s financial concerns even where there are signs of systemic weakness in the funding model. That pragmatic (or cynical, if you prefer) position is bolstered by a regulatory framework that views higher education providers primarily through the lens of service provision to students rather than as public institutions providing a range of public goods in places.

    Yet for a government that is politically and economically concerned with the provision of public goods in places, nor is it especially politically palatable to lean into the notion of independent higher education providers doing whatever they can to ensure their own success and sustainability rather than acting with reference to wider common purposes.

    There’s often a strong degree of overlap between institutional interests and the public interest – arguably one critical dimension of higher education leadership is being able to locate and occupy that common ground. Two things can be true: institutions can, and do, pursue both their own self-interest and the common good, simultaneously. And discussion of abstract concepts like public and private obviously ignores the actions and motivations of individual institutions, many of whom go to quite a lot of trouble and expense to work with and for the interests of their stakeholders.

    But at system level what you think an “HE reform package” should include depends very much on how much you think the private interests of HE institutions diverge from the wider public interest, in what areas of activity, and the extent to which you think the government can or should do something about it. And I don’t think those questions have yet been resolved in the corridors of power, where arguably the locus of responsibility for “higher education” as an object of policy remains scattered.

    It is relatively easy to point to examples of where the HE market model has created areas of concern – particularly when it comes to loss of subject diversity in particular regions or localities, or a lack of a subject offer in an area of known skills gaps, or to the rising costs to students and parents of sustaining full-time study, or to the risks to academic quality arising from particular modes of delivery or from instability in institutional finances. It’s much harder to articulate a policy settlement that articulates appropriate, measured, inexpensive and effective government intervention at system level to realign institutional and public interest where there appears to be divergence.

    In particular, when it comes to questions of “transformation” – in the sense of individual institutions changing their academic portfolio, or use of technology; in the sense of institutions joining together to create efficiencies or realise additional value from scale or coordination; and in the sense of the future overall size and shape of the sector – the role of government remains opaque. It may be possible that “transformation” will happen in response to market demand and financial pressure and be funded from private sources. It may also be possible that “transformation” will only occur with some active convening (and financing) from government. Whatever the claims made about what ought to be happening, nobody really has a firm view on how much transformation is really required, what it should look like, or whose responsibility it is to make it happen.

    It’s possibly not all that surprising, then, that what has emerged from government on higher education in the last academic year has been rather “bitty” – to use the appropriate technical term. A consultation on franchised provision here, a revision to free speech legislation there, a slide deck on preparing for the LLE over here, a cheeky new levy over there. Don’t expect a grandiose new vision for HE to emerge this year; instead turn your mind to deciding whether the sum total of all the things that will be occupying minds in the year ahead add up to something that equals a material change of state for the sector.

    It’s all coming up

    When the post-16 education and skills plus HE reform paper does show up, it will almost certainly hit some familiar notes: regional economic growth; skills; opportunity. We know there’s an appetite in government to think about “coordination” of post-16 providers in places and an aspiration to deploy a more coordinated approach to streamline everything from the regional skills offer to employer engagement.

    Policy architecture available includes the Devolution Bill, Skills England, the planned Growth and Skills Levy replacing the Apprenticeships Levy, and the Lifelong Learning Entitlement – as well as OfS’ signals on a shift to a more regional approach to widening access. There is significant support in principle for the notion of coordination for the benefit of places, but a glaring absence of ideas of how independent providers might be not only brought to the table but arrive at a consensus about who should offer what kind of education opportunity to whom.

    Also potentially in the mix for an “HE reform” package, if Bridget Phillipson’s priorities haven’t shifted in the last ten months, are academic quality, civic engagement, and efficiency. The Department for Education has not yet said what its plans are with regard to tightening up oversight of franchised provision, following its consultation earlier this year, so that may well appear also. OfS is already planning to consult on its planned new integrated quality framework in the autumn, so assuming there is effective coordination between government and the regulator there should be alignment between what the government proposes and what OfS consults on.

    One wild card to look out for is institutional governance – OfS has signalled in the past year that it has concerns about the ability of boards of governors to effectively manage financial sustainability challenges, whether that is in securing academic quality under pressure or retaining effective oversight of new partnerships and income streams, and that concern has been reinforced in communications from DfE. While it would be surprising to see government take a view on the constitution of boards or on the codes of practice they are encouraged to adhere to, it would not be entirely unexpected to see a request for OfS to further extend or strengthen regulatory oversight in this area. Elsewhere on the site, incoming Advance HE chief executive Alistair Jarvis has signalled some key priorities for development in governance within weeks of taking up the role.

    A further wild card would be something on graduate employability – previously ministers have suggested that institutions whose graduates do less well in the labour market by the current measures should cut the pay of their heads of institution. While that’s a proposal that obviously plays well for media, it doesn’t amount to a serious policy. But with (probably wildly overstated) concerns doing the rounds about graduate jobs and AI, and (much more sensible) questions about the value of graduate skills in different parts of the country feeding directly into ideas about equity of opportunity, government may well feel this is an area it wants to make a target for policymaking.

    Doing more with less

    The future of research funding seems increasingly lashed to the mast of economic growth. It is the golden thread that runs through UKRI’s latest plans, the basis of the industrial strategy, and UKRI rates financial sustainability within the research system as high risk and high likelihood.

    2025–26 is going to be about who gets paid, on what basis, and how the impact of the resulting research activity will be measured. Everyone’s favourite forever debate, the future of REF, fits neatly within this financial triangle. 2025–26 should bring certainty, if not consensus, on the shape of the next REF, even if the overall sum up for grabs is a fraction of the overall R&D budget. Given the timescales involved in REF it is likely that there will be some kind of announcement in the next few weeks on its future.

    Place is going to continue to be the primary lens through which economic growth is discussed. The Local Innovation Partnership will launch this academic year with at least £30 million for each of ten regions across the UK, including one in each of the devolved nations. The success of the industrial strategy is entirely reliant on improving productivity across the country so expect to see new funds, tweaks to existing funds, debates on devolutions deals, and a raft of place based initiatives coming from the sector.

    Once UKRI’s new mission leads are in post, along with UKRI’s new chief executive who is now in his role, the sector should have a clearer sense of how their work will align with the government’s missions. It would be refreshing if the new personnel also usher in a new era of stability across the research ecosystem. The evolving work into research evaluation may prove a useful tool in this mission.

    Of course economic growth is limited by the financial reality universities find themselves in. There is lots of concern about full economic costing (FEC) but very little action on reducing the financial burden of research. There are clear signals of reduced capital spending and following UKRI’s outgoing chief executives statement on the possibility of research consolidation it looks like frugality will continue to be a reality for many.

    Away from home this version of Horizon Europe enters its penultimate year with the UK’s entrance to the new scheme the government’s preferred option. The ongoing trampling of academic norms in America will continue to shape UK-US partnerships while the future of UK-China research partnerships will once again be at the mercy of global politics.

    At a more institutional level an outcome on the publishers agreements negotiations between the sector and five of the major publishers looks to be coming to a head. The sector currently spends £112 million annually on Jisc negotiated agreements with the five largest publishers. A decision on whether to accept or reject the publishers proposals is due imminently. If the offer is rejected there will be significant pressure to find agreement or an alternative before the end of the current deals in 2026.

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  • What’s in HE gender-based violence code – Campus Review

    What’s in HE gender-based violence code – Campus Review

    The National Higher Education Code to Prevent and Respond to Gender-based Violence passed through Parliament on Monday.

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