Daniel Jones

Congratulations to our colleague Tim Reinke-Williams for his latest article “Apprentice migration to London from Wales, 1600–1800” tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10… @FASTresearchUON

@kerrymlove Suspect we make HE debate too simple - sell uni as a solution rather than one possible opportunity. It gives you opportunity, you have to be in position to take that. And like all things, it isn’t a guarantee.

Big risk for Government seems to be that rise in tuition fees is too late/too little to avoid large-scale disruption to HE with course closures/mergers and redundancies. Potential for students to view it as paying more for a diminished system.

@kerrymlove Agree. People need opportunities at the end. And UK vs US salaries are insanely far apart now it feels like.

@kerrymlove Gov should be making educational furtherance at that age straight forward for young people - whether that is apprenticeship, FE, HE, whatever. Sadly they don’t. And the people we lose are often those whose voices are most needed in the system.

@kerrymlove It is sad. And yeah, they will say the tuition fees and how we pay them isn’t well understood (and that is true),but the maintenance support is far too small these days. Huge change in last ten years on how many students need to work, and the number of hours they work.

Whether it is as money leant to students with some coming back (fees), whether money direct to universities (teaching grant) or in funding for research, we need to spend more now to get more in the future. Build intellectual as well as physical infrastructure.

The Greens are wrong to say that tuition fees are what cause the funding issue in universities - the failure of successive governments to properly fund HE is. HE is a huge engine of social and economic good, and we've been running it on fumes for a long time.

@IanSollom There was a policy in 2010 taken up by East Mids LDs that proposed fully realising the Dearing Report, by ensuring all three stakeholders (students, society/government and business) paid into the system by a penny increase in the main rate (not small rate) of corporation tax.

The last Tory Gov't broke university funding: the system now is both unfair for students and is pushing universities to the brink. Simply raising fees in this broken system is not the solution - we need substantial reforms. Reintroducing maintenance grants would be a good start.

It shows how into our own echo chambers we get that I find it insane there isn’t more coverage of the deepening crisis in universities, especially after a budget that only made things worse. I’m told people won’t care until a uni goes bust badly, and they may be right.

Looks like Universities get the UKRI money protected from cuts, £40m to fund commercialisation of research, and an increase to their National Insurance costs. But no word on tuition fees or other support. Ultimately a net c. £100m cut in HE funding looking at budget in isolation.

@AmyCKing @benjamin__bland Never a bad time to be busy in the HE world as it is! Shall hopefully make them all feel…I would say at home but given the content..? Hmm. Warmly welcomed anyway!

@AmyCKing @benjamin__bland Looks amazing Amy! Hope they enjoyed it.

@OU_Williams Sorry to infer that you are facing some complaints or bother Chris. While we don’t agree on all things, you’ve always seemed very decent and well motivated!

I've gone locked on this. Doubtless the committee has a sock-puppet follower still in here -- hello, whoever you are! Tell me: five years ago did you expect that of all the world's issues, the one you'd be putting time in to solving would be . . . me?

@ProfTimBale Local press actually did refer to her as a childminder in headline and it wasn’t until third paragraph you got mention of husband.

Would they describe her spouse as “Childminder’s husband”? bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

When I keep saying that academia needs to consider how we can archive the internet and not rely on one single well-meaning point of failure…

Fully behind the point GPs are making that we need better care for trans and nonbinary people. Absolutely not behind the move to highlight this by withdrawing care from people on the grounds it is complicated. You are already involved, withdrawing isn’t a neutral act.

The Conservative party, much like Labour post-2015, has chosen to speak to a specific part of its base rather than rebuild the broad party. A real risk for them when Reform is talking to that same electorate, and their centre flank is being tempted by others. But I may be wrong!

Worth adding, that is deterioration across the system. We will still see individual universities struggle as this only incentivises the over recruitment by some universities even further.

Bringing back maintenance grants is great news. Increasing tuition fees by inflation though, given the gaps that have been allowed to develop in HE financing, will only stop further deterioration. It won't solve the underlying issues.