Dr Neil Harrison, Deputy Director of the Rees Centre
The team in the Department for Education (DfE) that produces statistics on progression to higher education have really upped their game recently. Starting with a trial last December, they are now publishing an annual digest of statistics looking at a wide range of demographic and educational groups, helpfully including a backwards time series. The latest of these digests was published a couple of weeks ago and covers the 2018/19 academic year. Importantly, these statistics are based on linking – at the individual level – the data collected by universities with that collected by schools and colleges, providing a rich lens to understand inequalities in the system.
Interestingly, one of the groups explored is care leavers. I have written before about issues with the statistics produced from the data collected by local authorities (the so-called ‘SSDA903’ data) and the new DfE digest represents a significant step change as it reflects definitive records about who has gone on to higher education, including in further education colleges and private providers.
It’s also important to note that the definition of ‘care leaver’ used is slightly quirky, in that it is not the statutory one. The definition used for analysis is those children in care continuously for the 12 months up to 31st March in the academic year when they turned 16 (i.e. Year 11 for the vast majority). In other words, the definition captures only those with a good degree of stability, although they may have changed placements in this time. It effectively excludes most of those entering care at 14 or 15.
What do the new statistics say?
The statistics in the digest reflect progression to higher education by the age of 19 – i.e. allowing for one ‘gap’ year after school/college. There are issues with this that I will return to shortly. The data focused on English young people, but includes (most) higher education elsewhere in the UK. For the purposes of this blog post, I’ve brought together several of the groups covered by the digest into the time series chart below:
We look first at the blue line representing care leavers. The progression rate for 2018/19 was 13%. This is more than double the oft-(mis)quoted 6% figure that comes from the SSDA903 dataset and I am confident this is much more a realistic reflection of the situation. There has been a pretty steady rise from 9% in 2009/10, with a couple of one year blips, which is also good news. This fits well with what universities say – I hear many reports of a year-on-year growth in care leavers and other care-experienced students.
However, the yellow line shows the situation for young people who are not care leavers and this starkly demonstrates a persistent inequality – the progression rate for this group was 43% in 2018/19. If anything, the gap between the blue and yellow lines has widened slightly over the ten years of the time series, from 25 percentage points in 2009/10 to 30 percentage points in 2018/19. This is worrying, as it suggests that care leavers have not been able to expand their ‘share’ of higher education at the same rate as other young people.
As I discussed in my 2017 ‘Moving On Up’ report, it is important to remember that there are strong explanatory factors at work and when you compare care leavers with similar demographic and educational profiles, much of this difference disappears. For example, care leavers are significantly more likely to have special educational needs which impact on their attainment and therefore on their ability to pursue higher education – at least in the short term. We will almost certainly never be in a position to eliminate the gap, but we should collectively be aiming for these lines to converge over time.
How do care leavers compare to other disadvantaged groups?
The green line represents young people who were eligible for free school meals when they were in Year 11. There are, once again, issues with this definition and what it means, but this is a useful broad proxy for children who grew up in economically disadvantaged households. The 2018/19 progression rate for this group was 26% and therefore double that of care leavers. Again there has been a widening of the gap across the time series, from 10 percentage points to 13 percentage points.
Finally, the red line – for which only four data points are available – represents children designated as being ‘in need’ on 31st March in the academic year when they turned 16. Interestingly, the higher education progression rate for this group is actually slightly lower than for the care leaver group – e.g. 11% in 2018/19.
This is consistent with other analysis, including the Rees Centre’s recent report (with the University of Bristol) looking at educational outcomes for children in need. More research is needed to understand this fully, but it suggests that long-term and stable care placements – often, if not always – support progression to higher education in comparison to other young people experiencing profound challenges within their birth family.
Why is looking at progression at age 19 an issue?
All quantitative analysis of social data is driven by definitional issues. These are rarely neutral or objective – you have to decide what groupings to use, how you determine the boundaries and so on. As discussed, the new DfE digests use a particular definition of a care leaver – if they used a different definition, the analysis would yield different results.
One decision is about time cut-offs. This is always tricky. The longer timeframe you look at, the less reliable the historic data become – if they exist at all. The DfE’s cut-off at the age of 19 is a longstanding one and makes sense for the general population who most commonly progress immediately after school/college or after a gap year.
However, as I’ve shown elsewhere, this does not hold for care-experienced students. The social and educational disruption they undergo as a result of their care journeys means that they are often not qualified or ready to pursue higher education at 18 or 19. In fact, most that do go to university, do so in their 20s or even later in life. We don’t yet know for sure, but it is likely that something like 25-30% of care-experienced people will undertake higher education at some point in their life.
This is still not high enough, but the DfE digest – useful as it is – can only ever be part of the story and the blue and yellow lines would be closer if a longer timeframe were used.
A final note…
It is always important to remember that progression into higher education is only one side of the coin and that there is good evidence that care leavers and other care-experienced students are at greater risk of leaving higher education early. It would be great to see some official figures from the DfE on this at some point, to help us to understand the scale of the problem.
Contact Neil: neil.harrison@education.ox.ac.uk
ESRC backs CGHE for a further three years with a ‘Transition Centre’ phase.
Earlier this week the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) advised the Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE) in writing of its intention to approve an additional three years of funding, in what ESRC calls the ‘Transition Centre’ phase. This followed a submission to ESRC by CGHE and a peer-based panel hearing at ESRC. It is expected that formal documentation of the funding extension will be sent in early March and the additional funding period will be from October 2020 to October 2023.
ESRC commented that ‘scientific and other outputs from the Centre’ in its first four years ‘made for an impressive record’ and commended CGHE’s forward work programme for the Transition Centre.
It noted that ‘for the Centre to realise its potential at the Transition phase, it needs to build on existing research and focus on synthesis, dissemination, and impact, as well as on building capability and financial sustainability.’ The forward plan emphasises academic publishing, briefings for policy makers and major public events designed to enhance the impact of the research. Though the funding base is smaller in ESRC Transition Centres than in the first phases, academic researcher time is funded by the participating universities and not the research council, and not all of CGHE’s current researchers formally continue into 2023, the ESRC panel urged that CGHE maintain contact with the full network that has been built up so far in order to maximise the effectiveness of the research programme.
CGHE will also conduct two new projects during the three years of the Transition Centre. The first project focuses on the role of research in higher education and an international comparison of research evaluation systems. The second is concerned with mapping the global policy space in higher education, including the role of donors and corporations, higher education in Africa and Central Asia/the Caucuses, and European higher education after Brexit.
CGHE has its headquarters at Oxford Department of Education and is directed by the Oxford Professor of Higher Education, Simon Marginson. In the UK it also includes researchers at the UCL Institute of Education, Lancaster University, the University of Bath, Sheffield University and Durham University. Oxford, UCL, Lancaster and Bath will be active in the Transition Centre phase. Oxford is refurbishing the current local CGHE precinct to house the expanding researcher group.
CGHE also has affiliated project researchers based in universities in China, Hong Kong SAR, Japan, Australia, South Africa, the United States, Ireland and the Netherlands.
Oxford researchers active in the Transition Centre will include Simon Marginson, Professors Alis Oancea, David Mills and Maia Chankseliani, Dr James Robson and Dr Xin Xu. It is expected that further funded CGHE projects will be developed at CGHE Oxford, as well as at CGHE’s other sites, and there will be exciting opportunities for emerging researchers to gain project experience and work with CGHE’s international team.
Find out more about the Centre for Global Higher Education here.
Judging by the size of the participant audience at the five sessions, the quality of the evidence-based papers and the stimulating conversation that ensued, the department’s Hilary Term public seminar series on ‘Student access to university’ were a great success.
Author: Simon Marginson, Professor of Higher Education
The seminars, held between January and March at four Oxford colleges and the Department of Education, packed out every venue and covered seminar topics spanning admissions testing, the fairness of access in English Higher Education, postgraduate access, fair access via contextualised admissions, and access at the University of Oxford. There were successive attendances of 97 (St Johns College), 90 (Department of Education), 78 (Linacre College), 113 (Lady Margaret Hall) and 120 (St Anne’s College).
Discussion at the final seminar on ‘Student Access to Colleges at the University of Oxford’ on 4 March, chaired by Sir Ivor Crewe from University College, led by a panel of college heads and senior tutors from five colleges, and with a response by Lucas Bertholdi-Saad from the Student Union, ran almost 20 minutes over time and could have continued well into the evening. Perhaps the seminars attracted those most reform-minded, not those sceptical of changes to orthodox academic entry, but it is clear that at Oxford there are strong desires for a broader social mix, and determination to make that a practical reality.
This discussion draws together three elements not always well aligned in research universities: a high academic mission with no limit to the level of intellectual excellence, systemically fair access, and positive discrimination in favour of disadvantaged students. The seminar series, convened by the department’s Jo-Anne Baird and Simon Marginson, formed part of the department’s flagship 100th anniversary events programme and started from the premise that lasting advances in social access can be secured only through defensible changes to policy, process and mechanisms that are grounded in research evidence.
The first seminar on 14 January on admissions testing, led by papers from Samina Khan (Director of Oxford Undergraduate Admissions and Outreach) and Jo-Anne Baird and chaired by Rebecca Surender as PVC for Equality and Diversity, set the tone. Test preparation effects had been found in previous research and those from schools with a track record of making applications to Oxford performed better on some of our admissions tests. One of the core questions discussed at this and succeeding seminars was how to consistently identify the potential for high university-level performance among students coming from home and school backgrounds rarely associated with outstanding school-level results. It was also apparent that a key issue is lack of adequate individual level data when making admissions decisions. Postcode identifiers simply do not suffice as indicators of disadvantage.
Three weeks later on 4 February, at the second seminar chaired by PVC (Academic) Martin Williams, an attentive room listened closely to Chris Millward, Director for Fair Access and Participation at the Office for Students (OFS) as he delivered a reasoned paper that mapped inequalities at national level and set down the OFS reform agenda. The social and educational principles outlined in the Millward paper were endorsed by respondent Simon Marginson and generally agreed in the often lively discussion that followed.
The third seminar on 11 February, chaired by Nick Brown as Principal of Linacre College and led by Paul Wakeling from York, opened up the issue of social access at postgraduate level. In a university such as Oxford where graduate students are 41% of the total student body (the proportion in 2017-18), and where majority graduate study is a real possibility in the future, the question of access at postgraduate stage is crucial. This also suggests that the social mix at graduate student stage should become part of the policy discussion. At present OFS comparisons and targets focus on the undergraduate level.
During the seminar Chris Martin from Social Sciences Division also raised the issue of international students and access. We give little effective thought to the implications of either high fee international education or doctoral scholarship places for issues of social justice. The questions posed by Chris were not answered during the series but in a university as internationalised as Oxford they can scarcely be ignored.
The fourth seminar on 25 February, chaired by Andrew Bell from University College, heard Durham’s Vikki Boliver lucidly set down the case for a contextualised approach to admissions – the use of standardised metrics for adjusting students’ school-based performance based on indicators of disadvantage. Research shows that students with a bare pass from some schools can perform as well at university as students from three As whose schools and families provide a stronger starting point. This is transformative.
It was striking that the Boliver paper seemed to be agreed by those present. There was also much interest in Lady Margaret Hall (LMH)’s Foundation year initiative. Contextualised admissions, linked to a mix of preparatory/foundation programmes, plus continuing academic support, together have the potential to remake the access landscape.
Oxford is often painted in public as inaccessible, inhabited by the privileged and indifferent to educational opportunity, social mobility and democratic responsibility. But as the seminar series made clear, there is a strong access conscience in the University. From the University Offices to many of the colleges and departments there is a closely networked conversation about widening access and there is much discussion of systems, processes and metrics.
There is no doubt students from upper income quintile families dominate first degree entry at Oxford. Using orthodox selection methods, that outcome is inevitable. However, it seems very likely that in coming years the University will move forward on inclusion of severely disadvantaged students in the bottom quintile, the group targeted by LMH and others.
This is where the OFS policy also points. However, as as LMH head Alan Rusbridger remarked in seminar 5, a focus on the severely disadvantaged alone, the students for whom normal academic selection must be set aside if they are to have opportunities, may confine the scope for change in the student mix to small scale movement at the margin.
The more difficult issue is to tackle the mainstream mechanisms of existing merit-based selection – to transform the overall mix (especially the balance of quintile 2-4 students) to ensure it is more representative of the UK as a whole and brings in high potential students selected in a valid, credible and agreed manner. Neither the department’s access seminar series nor the OFS have yet answered that big ‘how’ question. However, there is no doubt the seminars have continued the momentum on access issues at Oxford. The next steps will be interesting.
Listen to the seminar series in full, here:
Admissions Testing Preparation Effects, 14 January 2019
Jo-Anne Baird, Karen O’Brien, Samina Khan, Rebecca Surender
Access and Participation in English HE: A Fair and Equal Opportunity for All?, 4 February 2019
Simon Marginson, Chris Millward, Martin Williams
Access and Participation at Postgraduate Level: Research Findings and Their Implications for Policy and Practice, 11 February 2019
Paul Wakeling, Mike Bonsali, Nick Brown, Paul Martin
Promoting Fairer Access to Higher Education: The Necessity of Contextualised Admissions, 25 February 2019
Vikki Boliver, Andrew Bell, Peter Thonemann, Neil Harrison
Student Access to Colleges at the University of Oxford, 4 March 2019
Ivor Crewe, Helen King, Alan Rusbridger, Maggie Snowling, Simon Smith, Mark Wormald, Lucas Bertholdi-Saad
CELEBRATING 100 YEARS OF THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION
In 2019, the University of Oxford’s Department of Education celebrates the 100th year since the passing of a statute creating what was known in 1919 as the University Department for the Training of Teachers. To celebrate our centenary a year-long series of activities will be delivered to address some of the department’s top initiatives for 2019, answer some of the big questions facing education today and to reveal the advancements the department has made to the study of and research in the field of education. Join us as we mark our 100th year and discover more about our anniversary here.
If you have an interest in the future of education and would like to receive research updates from the Department of Education, join our mailing list.
Lucas Bertholdi-Saad, Oxford Student Union Vice-President for Access & Academic Affairs at the University of Oxford responds to a public seminar on ‘Student Access to the Colleges at Oxford University’ held by the Department of Education on 4 March.
Author: Lucas Bertholdi-Saad, VP Access & Academic Affairs, Oxford SU
Monday 4 March 2019
We’ve heard tonight about all the exciting things colleges are doing to make Oxford a better, fairer, more representative place. And students are so happy to be involved with these things. I host meetings for Junior Common Room & Middle Common Room access representatives, and you can always bank on the rep from Lady Margaret Hall being proud of the foundation year, St John’s students discussing Inspire, and excited Pathways helpers talking about inter-college schemes.
At the same time, the SU can be thought of as your critical friend – which is a fitting role for a respondent. Students can be pretty vocal in their criticisms of the Collegiate University on access. But we are critical because we believe passionately our colleges and our university can be better. Thousands of students volunteer every year, proudly donning their college t-shirts because they love their college and their course. And they are critical because they want to be able to wear that college jumper at home too, with pride that their university and college is doing the right thing on access.
Perhaps with these new initiatives Maggie Snowling (President, St John’s College, University of Oxford) and Helen King (Principal, St Anne’s College, University of Oxford) discussed, we will be there soon, and I wouldn’t be making this speech in three years’ time. But I will contrast with the previous speakers here because I think the current college model around admissions to Oxford actually acts to prevent the sort of change on access that students are calling for, and that we are all here in support of. I think we should look again at what admissions is trying to do, and if it is fit for purpose. Helen is right that this is hard, but our access problem shouldn’t just be tackled with additional schemes such as the bridging scheme, no matter how much students support them. It seems our mainstream admissions may stop us meeting our access ambitions and regulatory obligations, and we might have to change anyway.
The University is the focus of society’s attention and regulatory scrutiny – it gets called out in the press and it signs the access and participation plan. But the University, as we have heard, is not the admitting body – these are the Colleges. Colleges have different incentives to the University – they aren’t subject to the same regulatory and national scrutiny, and are small academic communities where one student struggling on their course is keenly felt. There is a mismatch here. The central university might want to take more disadvantaged students who could need extra support to do well on course, but the Colleges have incentives to play things a bit safer. That is before even getting into departmental priorities, or the incentives for individual academics who in many cases make the final decisions and have to actually teach who they admit. As Alan Rusbridger (Principal, Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford) pointed out, the numbers of additional disadvantaged students the University says it wants to recruit is not large – Joe Tutor might reasonably think he doesn’t need to give one of his three admissions slots to a flagged applicant. And if they are a bit more risky, surely someone else can pick up the slack in the 3,000 recruited every year?
Perhaps aligned incentives wouldn’t be important if everyone agreed about what we are looking for in admitted candidates. We wouldn’t need centralisation if the decentralised unit could act as one. That’s what we have the common framework for isn’t it?
Well let’s go back to the Common Framework. It isn’t a long document, and as Mark Wormald (Senior Tutor, Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford) mentioned it begins with the three objectives admissions procedures work towards: Attracting the most academically able, selecting those with the most potential to excel on course, and making sure admissions chances aren’t affected by college choice.
But the objective of selecting based on success on course can’t be the right one, even if it was easy to apply in practice. We have already agreed as a university that the criteria of success on course is biased because of attainment gaps.
Our strategic plan and our access and participation plan both include discussion on our race, gender, disability and class attainment gaps. These gaps exist when taking into account for prior attainment. If we just wanted those with the greatest potential to succeed, we’d bias admissions against women and minorities. That would be obviously illegal and I hope we’d agree unethical – so best and brightest is a poor description of what we are trying to do. And though it isn’t illegal to bias against working class or economically disadvantaged applicants because they do worse on course – going to a comprehensive is not a protected characteristic – surely it is unethical too, just as we have agreed around race and gender?
And this abstract view does not really explore actual practice at the level admissions decisions are made. It seems to me that admitting tutors to Oxford, even those in the same college interviewing for the same course, can disagree on what exactly they are interviewing for. We don’t always publish these criteria. Not all tutors interview scoring grid, and not all subjects to have clear specification criteria that admissions procedures test against. Many subjects rank all candidates to shortlist for interview against set criteria, and some like biochemistry produce a ranking after interview to determine who gets a place, but others leave final admitting decisions to be done by many different individuals on potentially different criteria.
So incentives are messy, and criteria aren’t always clear or consistently applied. If admissions produced outcomes we all agreed were perfect, perhaps this wouldn’t be an issue. But we aren’t where we want to be on ethnically diverse admissions, let alone access for disadvantaged students.
I have been working on access for ethnic minority students this year. As a university, there exists an offer rate gap between white and ethnic minority home applicants. If you take into account external factors – applicant course choice and prior attainment – and the gap will still exist, especially for Asian applicants. Asian applicants seem to perform worse on average in admissions tests and interviews, so taking those into account a lot of that offer rate gap might disappear. But it isn’t clear we should take the test and the interview for granted. A 2017 Supreme Court case, Essop v Home Office, can give a steer. A civil service test that was being used to determine promotion, and ethnic minority applicants were more likely to fail. It was broadly determined that it was on the Home Office to objectively justify their test to avoid a finding of unlawful indirect discrimination. Those bringing the case did not need to give a reason why ethnic minorities doing worse on the test was discriminatory.
The relevant legislation, the Equality Act 2010, is also intended to apply to admissions procedures to universities, and there is clear guidance around the equality act and Higher Education. Mark Wormwald has mentioned our muddled accountability structures, and it doesn’t seem clear to me who would be called as the respondent if some disgruntled applicant decided to test the law, and ask if they missed out on a place at Oxford because of indirect discrimination at the interview – or even at admissions test stage, which is sometimes, but not always, marked name-blind.
The current institutional framework around student access to Colleges at Oxford does not just make it difficult to make progress on the access in general, then. And it may make it difficult for the Collegiate University to comply with its regulatory obligations. We have let a hundred flowers bloom with colleges leading the access agenda. Some are very interesting and impressive blooms indeed – Maggie Snowling and Alan Rusbridger spoke about the amazing things their colleges have done. But I do think we need to make some changes to get to a place where we can all be proud of this university on access, students and staff alike. Reflecting on our current gaps and our current successes, I would suggest we need a new and shared vision of fair admissions, measured on the extent to which it produces a diverse and representative student body. We need transparent admissions criteria, decided by academics, which are consistently applied to students. We need to be able to produce a final ranking of every applicant in every subject, so we can see the impact of every step of our process. And we need to have a clear chain of accountability, so we know who to praise when it all works out.
To listen to ‘Student Access to University’ in full, visit here.
About the series
‘Student Access to University’ was a five-part public seminar series, led by the Department of Education and convened by Jo-Anne Baird (Director, Department of Education) and Simon Marginson (Professor of Higher Education, Department of Education). The series, which was held from 14 January – 4 March 2019, formed part of the department’s 100th Anniversary celebrations and included a wealth of speakers from across the University and the Higher Education sector. It aimed to move access forward through public discussion and a research-based treatment, reflecting on the scope for development and reform at Oxford and in the country as a whole.
All seminars in the series have been made available as podcasts, which can be listened to here:
‘Student Access to College at the University of Oxford’, 4 March 2019
With Ivor Crewe, Helen King, Alan Rusbridger, Maggie Snowling, Simon Smith, Mark Wormald and Lucas Bertholdi-Saad
‘Promoting Fairer Access to Higher Education: The Necessity of Contextualised Admissions’, 25 February 2019
With Andrew Bell, Vikki Boliver, Peter Thonemann and Neil Harrison
‘Access and Participation at Postgraduate Level: Research Findings and their Implications for Policy and Practice’, 11 February 2019
With Nick Brow, Paul Wakeling, Paul Martin and Mike Bonsall
‘Access and Participation in English HE: A Fair and Equal Opportunity for All?’, 4 February 2019
With Martin Williams, Chris Millward and Simon Marginson
‘Admissions Testing Preparation Effects’, 14 January 2019
With Rebecca Surender, Jo-Anne Baird, Samina Khan, Alison Matthews and Karen O’Brien
CELEBRATING 100 YEARS OF THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION
In 2019, the University of Oxford’s Department of Education celebrates the 100th year since the passing of a statute creating what was known in 1919 as the University Department for the Training of Teachers. To celebrate our centenary a year-long series of activities will be delivered to address some of the department’s top initiatives for 2019, answer some of the big questions facing education today and to reveal the advancements the department has made to the study of and research in the field of education. Join us as we mark our 100th year and discover more about our anniversary here.
If you have an interest in the future of education and would like to receive research updates from the Department of Education, join our mailing list.
Access to higher education is a major social issue in the UK as in most countries. Overall participation in the UK is moving towards 50 per cent of the school leaver age group but non-white students, state school students and students from disadvantaged regions of the UK are under-represented in academically elite universities. This pattern affects entry, completion and outcomes in graduate labour markets. Access to the University of Oxford is a persistent debate. Must universities choose between high standards and socially equitable admissions, or can we have both? What is the scope for change?
In Hilary Term 2019 the Oxford Department of Education will hold a five-part seminar series on ‘Student Access to University’ at venues across the University. We believe that the public discussion of access can move forward by bringing to it a research-based treatment. At the same time, reasoned and data-driven approaches to these vital issues will help us to reflect on the scope for development and reform at Oxford and in the country as a whole.
The scheduled dates for the seminars are Monday 14 January, 4 February, 11 February, 25 February and 4 March 2019, with the seminars running from 5 pm to 6.30 pm. Speakers will include experts from across the University and the Higher Education sector, including, Jo-Anne Baird (Director and Professor, Department of Education, University of Oxford), Samina Khan (Director of Undergraduate Admissions and Outreach, University of Oxford), Chris Millward (Director of Widening Participation, Office for Students), Paul Wakeling (University of York), Simon Marginson (Professor of Higher Education, Department of Education, University of Oxford) and Vikki Boliver (Director of Research, Professor and Deputy Head of Department of Sociology, Durham University). There will be ample opportunity for full public participation in discussion.
The full programme details can be found here.
The Department of Education’s Public Seminar Series are held on a termly basis throughout the academic year and are designed to engage wider audiences in topical research areas across the department. Seminars are free to attend and open to all. Each series is convened by a member of the department and seminars are held on most Mondays during term from 5pm. Speakers include a wealth of academics from across the department and the wider University, as well as internationally recognised professionals from across the globe. All upcoming seminars are publicised, in advance, on the department’s event pages. Visit: www.education.ox.ac.uk/news-events/events/
2019 will mark the department’s 100th anniversary since becoming a University department, in 1919. To celebrate this milestone, a year-long series of themed activities will be delivered, starting with the Public Seminar Series on ‘Student Access to University’. If you have an interest in the future of education and would like to be kept informed of our anniversary activities, join our mailing list to receive the top news, publications and event opportunities for the forthcoming year and beyond.
University World News, 26 November 2018
Article by Simon Marginson (Professor of Higher Education)
Times Higher Education
Professor Simon Marginson (Professor of Higher Education) comments on the newly announced Times Higher Education World Rankings League 2019.
FE Week
Comment piece by Professor Ewart Keep (Director of the Centre for Skill, Knowledge and Organisational Development).