Paul Temple.
Jamie Martin, a Leave campaigner and former special adviser to Michael Gove has written a piece in Times Higher Education on how British universities could achieve “education leadership in a post-Brexit world”. Martin begins his article by giving the impression that he sees the Battle of Waterloo in terms of plucky little England standing up to a gang of foreigners. In fact, the Duke of Wellington led a proto-EU multinational army group that would have certain sections of the Press frothing with rage if it was even suggested today. In 1815, it was Napoleon who stood alone against a combined Europe.
The rest of Martin’s piece is a good example of what I suppose we’ll have to get used to from the Brexiters. From being told, pre-referendum, that there were lots of golden opportunities there for the taking once we were freed from the EU’s iron grip (though specific examples were hard to come by), we’re now told that, fingers crossed, there may be ways round the (accurately predicted) difficulties that Brexit presents. It’s as if the UK had just drifted in from mid-Atlantic to find all these interesting things going (more…)

Simon Marginson.
Modern higher education began in the United States in the 1960s. Participation grew rapidly in the world’s first mass higher education system, federal grants underpinned a remarkable growth in research, and the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education in California established a template for system design that was to shape developments across the world. (more…)

Now we know. Justine Greening, MP for Putney, Roehampton and Southfields, has become the new Secretary of State for Education and Minister for Women and Equalities. Her brief is to include higher education and skills, formerly under the Department for Business Innovation and Skills. Downing Street says the education department will take on responsibility for: “Reforming the higher education sector to boost competition and continue to improve the quality of education that students receive; and delivering more apprenticeships through a fundamental change in the UK’s approach to skills in the workplace”.
Ms Greening, one of the few education secretaries to have attended a non-selective state secondary school – Oakwood Comprehensive in Rotherham – was previously Secretary of State for International Development. The new education secretary has a background in accountancy.
While teacher supply –  discussed in a recent IOE blog post – will be at the top of her very full in-tray, she will also need to master a wide range of topics from Academies to Teacher education. As early as next week, she will have to steer the Higher Education and Research Bill through its second reading. Here, IOE experts suggest priorities for Ms Greening to consider in key areas of education policy. (more…)

Germ Janmaat. 
Time and again the opinion polls of the last few weeks have shown that the vast majority of young people wanted Britain to stay in the EU. On the day of the vote 73% of the 18 to 24-year-olds said they had voted to remain (in contrast to the 60% of those aged over 65 saying they voted leave).
The young have good reasons to stay in. The EU not only offers them unlimited access to the job and housing markets of other member states, it also provides them with many opportunities to get a decent education at very little cost. Increasingly, universities on the mainland offer English-language BA and MA courses and proffer these at a fraction of the tuition fees of English universities. No wonder then that many British students are now studying in Europe. According to The Guardian, as many as a third of British students are considering overseas study.
The risk is that Brexit, depending on what it actually looks like in practice, shatters these (more…)

William Locke. 
The growing pressures faced by universities have had an impact on academic careers. Changes to academic roles, contracts and career paths, along with increasing workloads, have created new challenges. Yet in today’s competitive global environment, academic career opportunities are key to universities’ future success.
A report for the Higher Education Academy (HEA) by Celia Whitchurch, Holly Smith, Anna Mazenod and me investigates these challenges and proposes a number of solutions. (more…)

Chris Husbands. 
I’ve already written about my own departure from the IOE – leaving, in just a few weeks’ time, to become Vice Chancellor at Sheffield Hallam University. As we all know, leaving one job and starting another is  a time of mixed emotions: the combination of apprehension and excitement, the sense of the unfinished business which will remain forever unfinished, the opportunity, albeit briefly, to take stock. It’s in this context that I reflect on the award of a Queen’s Anniversary prize for Higher Education to the Institute of Education. (more…)

Simon Marginson.
The pursuit of global mobility in a world divided up into nations invokes a fundamental dilemma. Free passage without harassment is a right we routinely expect to exercise whenever we travel abroad. Yet the right of people within a country to determine who enters their nation is enshrined in law. This unresolvable tension between sovereignty and mobility catches international students in its grip.
More than 4.5m students cross borders every year for educational purposes, mostly entering English-speaking countries, Western Europe, China, Japan and Russia. The great majority of these students return home when their education ends, though some become skilled migrants to the country of education, or other countries. Nations compete for international students – every country wants high-quality research students (more…)

Simon Marginson‌ 
In October 2015 the doors of a major new Economic and Social Research Council-supported research centre will open at UCL IOE. It will be the largest centre in the world that is focused on research in relation to higher education.
Higher education (HE) systems are now more important in societies and economies than they have ever been. The role of professional and skilled labour in the workforce is expanding everywhere, and while graduate salaries are falling relative to average incomes, graduates maintain their advantage over non graduates. This drives the continued growth of higher education enrolments everywhere, so that one third of all people in the world now enrol in some form of tertiary education. Participation in two-year programmes and degree programmes together is increasing at a rate of 1 per cent a year. At first sight this may not seem much, but it is extraordinarily rapid by historical standards, lifting the proportion of the population with tertiary education (more…)

Chris Husbands
In 1993, Shane Warne, the great Australian spin bowler bowled to England’s Mike Gatting. The ball, heading towards the leg stump was played by Mike Gatting, and then, at the last moment, in a twist of pure genius from Warne, the ball turned sharply and took out Mike Gatting’s off-stump. You can see the ‘ball of the century’ on any number of video clips: the most remarkable spin bowling any one can recall.
But as spin, it pales in comparison with the efforts of university communications departments following the publication – at one minute past midnight on December 18^th – of the results of the 2014 REF. (more…)

Paul Temple
Is the management of universities much different to the management of other sorts of big, complex organisations? In my new book, The Hallmark University (IOE Press), I argue that it is (or should be) recognisably different – although the best-run commercial organisations have many things in common with the best-run universities. Accounts of what it’s like working at Google sound a lot like working in a university. (more…)