This blog post is an edited version of a speech given by Professor Jonathan Grant to The Culture Capital Exchange at St George’s House in Windsor Castle for a debate on the issue of excluding arts and humanities from the UK government’s ‘STEM’ research agenda. The full speech, and those of other invited speakers can be found on the Culture Capital Exchange website.
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poppicinic – Pixabay
Understanding the factors that enable an academic research department to be ‘high-performing’ is key to identifying ways in which we can do research better, and more effectively. In this blog post we examine the findings from our research, published in November 2015 by the Policy Institute at King’s and RAND Europe, which aimed to isolate the ingredients that make up a ‘high-performing’ research unit.
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Studies of high impact research over the last 10-20 years have been drawn together to develop eight lessons for biomedical and health organisations to consider as part of their research funding strategies, writes Adam Kamenetzky from the Policy Institute at King’s College London.
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Jonathan Grant, King’s College London
One thing is clear about the government’s recent proposals to reform higher education: they will shape and sculpt the UK’s higher education system for the foreseeable future – but at what cost?
In its Fulfilling our Potential green paper, published in November, the government set out how it wants to both control the price of higher education, through tuition fees, and determine the quality of teaching through a proposed Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), which plans to reward universities with the best quality teaching. The overall objective is to improve the quality of teaching in universities, as well as the esteem associated with teaching, and enhance social mobility. Continue reading
Flickr – Biking Nikon SFO
Like many policy areas in recent times, the quality assurance of higher education has faced calls for it to be more ‘risk based’ and make greater use of metrics to predict how Higher Education (HE) providers may perform in the future. The attraction of a risk-based approach is clear: HE providers perceived as low risk by the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) are freed from the burden of regulation and allowed to flourish whilst it focuses on ensuring quality in those HE providers it perceives as high risk. But is this currently feasible? In this blog post, Alex Griffiths describes how new research is uncovering the risks of a risk-based approach. Continue reading