First-hand accounts from people who knew him. Collected by his students.

When teaching staff are casualised and cut while delivering the core business of universities, something is broken, say Katharine Hubbard and Damien Page

A new paper by Dr Katharine Hubbard, Making Metrics Matter: Tackling Racial Inequity in Higher Education (HEPI Debate Paper 43), argues progress towards racial equity in English higher education has b...

Plants provide oxygen, food, shelter, medicines and environmental services, without which human society could not exist. Tackling pressing and global challenges requires well-trained plant scientists...

Today* I am angry. Yet another person I know who exhibits toxic behaviour in the workplace has been ‘failed upwards’. This is a well known phenomenon whereby individuals are not sacked for poor beh…

Today* I am angry. Yet another person I know who exhibits toxic behaviour in the workplace has been ‘failed upwards’. This is a well known phenomenon whereby individuals are not sacked for poor beh…

Today* I am angry. Yet another person I know who exhibits toxic behaviour in the workplace has been ‘failed upwards’. This is a well known phenomenon whereby individuals are not sacked for poor behaviour, but rise through the ranks of higher education. Taking their (often appalling) behaviour with them to a new institution, usually with a hefty salary and title bump to go with it.

There’s no nice way to talk about redundancy. It doesn’t arrive as a single moment, even when there is a single date attached to it. It arrives in phases: uncertainty, waiting, the conversation its…

There’s no nice way to talk about redundancy. It doesn’t arrive as a single moment, even when there is a single date attached to it. It arrives in phases: uncertainty, waiting, the conversation itself, the aftermath. For some, it’s sudden. For others, it’s drawn out and quietly exhausting. Either way, it has a way of cutting through confidence, identity, and momentum, particularly in a sector many of us entered because we believed in it.

The Office for Students’ (OfS) latest proposal represents a significant shift in how teaching quality and student outcomes will be assessed. The message is clear: every higher education provider will be pulled into a single, integrated quality-assessment system that blends the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) with core regulatory conditions. For the sector, it’s a moment of scrutiny, but also a chance to rethink how we support students.

Plants provide oxygen, food, shelter, medicines and environmental services, without which human society could not exist. Tackling pressing and global challenges requires well-trained plant scientists....

First-time buyers set to save money when buying a home and timelines reduced with a new consultation launched by the Government.

I recently wrote about the importance of understanding what is ‘below the iceberg’. The post seemed to resonate with many, so I thought I would extend this train of thought a little more. Here I will focus on how we present our careers to others, particularly to students and early career academics. I am often invited to give scientific talks to schools and colleges, and they often ask that I include content relating to my career journey.

One of the songs that makes me cry the most is Vienna by Billy Joel. I feel like that song has directly looked into my soul and summed me up in 3 minutes with more insight than any therapist has ever managed. All to a beautiful melody. What a song writer. Take a moment out of your day to listen to it.

Despite the wealth of student services, many still fall through the cracks. Buxi Duan makes the case for a proactive, data-informed approach to support through academic coaching Despite the wealth of...

Jim Dickinson has been stuck on trains again, looking at what universities tell students about local cost of living. If anything it's worse than last year - only now there's clearer legal consequences...

Full Time (37 hrs per week) Permanent Contract – High Wycombe </st

Operational clarity isn’t something that happens at the end of a project; it’s something you have to build into delivery itself. When you think about what it means to deliver a project, especially …

Reflections on the place hope might occupy in Chemistry Education, prompted by Gannon’s Radical Hope: a teaching manifesto .

Oxford university students protesting in 2015. Original image (c) The Telegraph A lot of my work focusses on inclusive education. One component of this focuses on decolonisation and diversification of the curriculum. Today I want to try and unpick what I mean by these two concepts, and to consider whether it matters in practice or not. I will first of all put a big disclaimer in here.

The postgraduate population is growing, but there appears to be less interest in regulating this area of higher education, much less how equitable outcomes are. Katharine Hubbard asks the sector to pa...

Specialist in Higher Education Pedagogy and Practice

I have a confession to make - I don’t have a teaching qualification. I am an award winning educator, National Teaching Fellow and a Principal Fellow of AdvanceHE. But I am entirely self-taught, and have never had any formal training in how to teach within HE. My career illustrates the difference between a taught qualification and professional recognition. I haven’t really done any formal training - I haven’t done a PostGraduate Certificate in Academic Practice (PCAP), or an MA or EdD.

For centuries, the academy was exclusive to the Christian elite. When that began to change, an onslaught began

This year has been a pretty turbulent one for higher education. In the USA, it feels like every week there is another attack on higher education and on anything related to Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI in the UK - I’m not sure why it seems to be DEI in the US). It has to be said a depressing number of institutions and professional societies have demonstrated a complete lack of backbone in not only immediately complying with orders from the Trump administration, but going even further than has been suggested.

If you ask most university educators what the most time consuming aspect of their job is, you will probably get the answer of ‘teaching prep’. I’ve certainly worked into the small hours many a time trying to perfect my lecture slides. I’ve created so many really high quality slide decks, including carefully thought out animations and annotations. I’ve searched for diagrams to use with my students, failed to find one I really like, and then spent hours creating a slightly different one, hacking the built in shapes to create lovely diagrams that are just the way I want them.

What would you do with £1 million to improve accessibility and inclusion of your teaching lab? I share some of my suggestions and experiences of small and big changes that can be made to ensure disabled staff and students feel they belong in labs.