General HE policy

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  1. UA’s asks ahead of the Spring Budget

    Addressing the immediate challenges facing our universities and their students  UK universities now incur losses of £6bn annually on their core activities of research and teaching for UK home students. Our members are making significant changes to adjust to financial pressures, including major restructuring and transformation programmes. Recent analysis by PwC demonstrates that all universities […]

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  2. University groups call for cross-government health education taskforce

    With the latest UCAS data showing applications are down for medicine, nursing and midwifery courses, leaders from the higher education sector are calling for a new taskforce to effectively deliver NHS England’s Long-Term Workforce Plan. In a jointly-written letter sent to the Secretaries of State for Education and Health, a coalition of university mission groups […]

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  3. University Alliance responds to the latest UCAS application data

    Vanessa Wilson, CEO of University Alliance, has commented in response to the latest UCAS application data, released today (15 January): On the decline of applications for public sector workforce courses, Vanessa Wilson, CEO of University Alliance, said: “The continued decline in applications for subjects like teaching, nursing and midwifery spell trouble for the future of […]

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  4. UA briefing on international students

    International student numbers have been growing in the UK as part of a government strategy to grow education export income for the UK, provide financial sustainability for universities without increasing the contribution of taxpayers or UK students, and ensure our country remains globally connected. Universities have supported this strategy both because we believe in the power of […]

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  5. Universities, the NHS, and health workforce transformation

    This article was originally published in Wonkhe. Working alongside the NHS requires universities to constantly be adapting. The relationship between universities and the health and social care sector can be described as evolutionary. For decades, nurses were trained directly on wards, with schools of nursing traditionally hosted by individual hospitals. Training began to move towards […]

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  6. Changes to student maintenance loans: UA’s response

    On Thursday 25 January, the government announced that maintenance loan payments would rise by 2.5% from September 2024 for students in England. On Friday 26th, the Department for Education released its Equality Impact Assessment for HE student finance in 2024/25, which looked at the impact of the proposed changes. In our latest briefing, we highlight […]

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  7. Letter in the Financial Times: what’s miss­ing in the con­ver­sa­tion about uni­versit­ies

    In a letter to the Financial Times, University Alliance CEO Vanessa Wilson talks about what’s missing in the conversations about the current challenges facing the higher education sector. “Robert Shrims­ley’s piece on the crisis in higher edu­ca­tion (Opin­ion, Janu­ary 18) sum­mar­ises the fin­an­cial chal­lenges facing uni­versit­ies in Eng­land well. There’s something miss­ing however in the […]

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  8. Unpacking the TEF narratives: what does teaching excellence at an Alliance university look like?

    The 2023 TEF submissions have been published but, as Jim Dickinson and David Kernohan observed on WonkHE, “there’s no way any human is going to read all of them”. I have however read the institutional narratives from the 14 English members of University Alliance (16 of the UK’s leading professional and technical universities) and have […]

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  9. 2023 in review

    It’s been another whirlwind year for the higher education sector – and a successful one for the Alliance.  These are my reflections on a few of the stand-out moments from 2023.  1. ‘Must do better’: the House of Lord’s Industry and Regulators Committee reviews the OfS  We kicked off the year by working with our […]

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