New FE colleges? Or a new policy for FE colleges?

New FE colleges? Or a new policy for FE colleges?

Today’s headlines contain a catchy claim from BIS and from Matthew Hancock that the Government is opening a new FE college to help train the workers who will build HS2. According to the story, it’s the first new FE college for twenty years. The college, to...
How do we save ‘Widening Participation’?

How do we save ‘Widening Participation’?

We don’t talk about widening participation quite as much as we used to. Back at the time of the Dearing Review and New Labour’s commitment to a 50% target and the economic and social benefits of mass higher education, we took it for granted. But not...
New strategy for new times

New strategy for new times

In case it passed you by we’ve just had “living wage week”. Almost every cause gets a day or a week dedicated to it nowadays, and Nov 4th–8th 2013 was the moment we were supposed to turn our attention to the living wage. It’s a serious issue, of course. Low pay is a...

You are small, but could you be massive?

“When the best brands start giving their courses away for free, we have to take note. We must ask, are we prepared to be on the wrong side of history? We disrupt ourselves now or let someone else do it,” – that was the message from Open University Vice Chancellor,...