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The latest announcements, press releases and media coverage from University Alliance.

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  1. ‘Delivering the Healthcare Workforce of the Future’: University Alliance publishes proposals to help tackle the NHS workforce crisis

    January 31, 2023

    University Alliance, an association of universities which collectively trains 30% of nurses in England, has today (31 January) published a briefing on ‘Delivering the Healthcare Workforce of the Future’. It comes at a time when the NHS is facing a workforce crisis, with over 130,000 vacancies in England and over 46,000 vacant nursing posts – a record high. A key challenge is the need to train more nurses more quickly to the same very high standar…

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  2. UA’s response to the Migration Advisory Committee’s review of the Graduate Route Visa

    May 14, 2024

    Today (14 May) Professor Jane Harrington, Vice Chancellor of the University of Greenwich and Chair of University Alliance has responded to the MAC review of the graduate route: “Today’s report has highlighted the substantial benefits of the graduate route to the UK. The route is clearly helping the government meet the objectives it set out and should be seen as a significant policy success. Any changes to the graduate route would be an inexplicab…

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  3. 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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  4. UA’s asks ahead of the Spring Budget

    February 27, 2024

    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 remain extremely vulnerable to scenarios that are not…

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

    February 19, 2024

    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 and educators have called on the government to convene a new ministerial taskforce to…

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  6. University Alliance responds to the latest UCAS application data

    February 15, 2024

    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 our public sector. A concerted effort to reverse these trends will be requi…

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  7. UA briefing on international students

    February 7, 2024

    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 global connectivity, and because international student fees fill a …

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  8. 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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  9. Changes to student maintenance loans: UA’s response

    January 30, 2024

    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 how the proposed levels of student maintenance support fall short, and make the case for improved…

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

    January 23, 2024

    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 conversation about the value of universities, w…

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