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  1. UA’s response to the OfS’ report on the financial sustainability of HE

    May 16, 2024

    Professor Jane Harrington, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Greenwich and Chair of University Alliance said in response to the Office for Students’ report on the financial sustainability of higher education providers: ‘Today’s Office for Students’ report presents a stark picture of university finances, and comes at a critical time for the higher education sector. It underlines how impossible it is for universities to manage and plan their fin…

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  2. Explainer: international students at Alliance universities

    March 28, 2024

    This briefing examines the drivers behind growth in the number of international students studying at Alliance universities in recent years, and the decline we have seen in 2024. By many of the government’s own measures of quality, including the Teaching Excellence Framework and the National Student Survey, Alliance Universities are some of the highest quality universities in the UK. International students know that, and it goes some way to explai…

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    faustina

  3. Universities, the NHS, and health workforce transformation

    February 5, 2024

    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 higher education in the mid-1990s, but it took until 2009 for a…

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

    December 18, 2023

    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 drawn out the key themes which characterise a TEF submission from an Alliance university. Considering Alliance un…

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  5. 2023 in review

    December 14, 2023

    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 fellow mission groups across the sector on a joint letter calling for an inquiry into the performance of the Office for Students. Though we …

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  6. ‘What now?’: how adaptations to assessment during COVID-19 can improve inclusivity

    December 6, 2023

    Pandemic learnings   As the public Covid-19 inquiry grinds painfully on, it is appropriate for us in the Higher Education sector to conduct a little reflection of our own.   There is much about lockdown life we all want to forget: the grim headlines, the concern for our loved ones and ourselves, the questionable Netflix binges and loo roll shortages. But despite the countless negative impacts of lockdown, something interesting happened in our uni…

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  7. Placed-based innovation at RGU Orkney

    November 29, 2023

    “Orkney is a unique archipelago of islands, regularly ranked as one of the best places to live in the UK. But its appeal is much greater than this. Orkney has an entrepreneurial and innovative culture which lends itself to testing new and varied ideas. As an island group, it offers variety through its mix of towns, rural mainland areas and outer islands, each with differing demographics, service requirements and landscape. Orkney is large enough …

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    Elsa Cox

  8. How Professional Doctorates are empowering nurses and midwives to lead

    November 15, 2023

    In our latest ‘Innovators’ blog, Dr Helen Aveyard writes about how Oxford Brookes University are empowering nurses and midwives to become researchers. “In 2021, The Chief Nursing Officer for England, Ruth May, published the Strategic Plan for Research which outlines the intention to ‘create a research environment that empowers nurses to lead, participate in and deliver research, where research is fully embedded in practice and professional decisi…

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    Helen Aveyard

  9. How Anglia Ruskin University’s Live Brief modules are enhancing graduate employability

    October 26, 2023

    Employability is an individual matter. It requires each student to embrace their professional development and to access the support and opportunities our universities provide. Unfortunately, many students leave it too late, assuming employability is a set of skills they can acquire at some point before they graduate. However, academics and other staff responsible for employability know that its development requires steady, deeper, and ongoing eng…

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  10. Let’s get strategic

    October 5, 2023

    If you ask any UK Vice Chancellor what’s keeping them awake at night, it’s highly likely to be the financial sustainability of their institution and the wider sector. Years of frozen funding coupled with rising costs are inevitably taking their toll across all four nations. University leaders are also increasingly worried about the impact the cost-of-living crisis is having on students – both current and prospective. The 2023-24 admissions cycle …

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    Susanna Kalitowski