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Video message for roundtable discussion on LNG & Shipping organised by CBS Alumni Club and Columbia Global Energy Centre
European Commission Speech Brussels, 04 May 2026 Ladies and gentlemen, I have been asked to present the EU perspective on the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. But first, allow me to welcome that finally after ...
27 May 2026
‘One of the greatest invisible tragedies’: is the loss of childhood imagination inevitable?
We have created the most stifling and sanitised imaginative space conceivable for children, says teacher Brendan James Murray. Today true imagination has become a radical act The six children sit together at the waterline in roaring wind. Seagulls dip and strain, beating their wings against the gusts as, far below, waves crest, thump, whisper. A girl, scarcely three years old, stands suddenly and looks out towards that horizon. Striding past them in the distance, his immense feet hidden beneath the rim of the horizon, is a giant. American artist NC Wyeth painted The Giant in 1923. The low angle emphasises the giant’s immensity, and all the children’s faces are turned away from the viewer. In this way, those children become anyone we care to transpose into this magical scene. What child has not lain in the grass to watch some cloud-image, an animal perhaps, gradually dissolve into the amorphous collection of water droplets that are its banal reality? Continue reading...
10 May 2026
I knew my writing students were using AI. Their confessions led to a powerful teaching moment | Micah Nathan
The problem wasn’t just the perfectly polished, yet mediocre prose. It’s what’s lost when we surrender the struggle to translate thought into words I have been teaching fiction writing at MIT since 2017. Many of my students last wrote fiction in middle school, and very few have experienced a proper workshop, so at the start of every semester I offer these directions for writer and reader alike: Read the story at least twice. Mark what works and what doesn’t – underline great sentences, flag clunky syntax, gaps in logic and unrealistic dialogue. Ask yourself: does the story work? Why or why not? What could improve it? Answer in a signed letter to the author, attached to their story. Give your honest opinions. Remember that an effective peer review demands close reading of the text accompanied by a boldness of spirit. Continue reading...
10 May 2026
WEEKEND READING: ‘There’s no point wishin’ fo’ owt’’: What can we learn from Danny Scott’s 2025 book, The Undisputed King of Selston, about widening access to higher – indeed to any – education?
This blog was kindly authored by Lucy Haire, Director of Sector Engagement, UPP. Before becoming the author of the recently published The Undisputed King of Selston , Danny Scott grew up in an East Midlands mining village, serving his apprenticeship as an engineer on leaving school, before moving to London in the 1980s. After a job in counter (industrial) espionage, he became a private investigator, then a painter and decorator, then an engineer again, before becoming a journalist and interviewing people like Sir Paul McCartney, Mikhail Gorbachev, Usain Bolt and Dave Hill from Slade. The ‘Clever Bugger’ and the mining belt While the book is primarily about the culture of his mining community and the dynamics of his family, education is discussed within it at some length. Ideas about what limits educational opportunities are brought to life through vivid scenes and characters, which can easily bring a tear to your eye, yet are also somehow devoid of a sense of victimhood. The mother of all barriers Danny absolutely loved his first primary school, Selston Church of England Infants’ School, where he excelled and won prizes. But this ‘Clever Bugger’ drew the attention of one or two school bullies, like ‘Sadistic-Bus-Stop’ and later, at Baghrope Primary School, Mark ‘Grovey’ Musgrove, who would mete out sufficient taunting and violence that it was worth Danny taking a very circuitous route to school to avoid an encounter. Danny also meticulously planned, executed and got away with a judo-inspired counter-attack in the school yard. Perhaps most shockingly, however, was the relentless contempt his own mother showed for her son’s achievements, with phrases like, ‘Ah left school at fourteen an’ when t’ service. Ah canna read ‘n’ write, burr it nivver did may any ‘arm’. In response to Danny’s prize for spelling, she said, ‘Wot d’ yuh want t’ be like that for? Answerin’ questions ‘an’ showin’ off all o’ time.’ ‘Maybe university’: the weight of teacher expectations On his last day at Bagthorpe Primary School, the teacher, Mr Hallet, wandered round the class pointing at pupils and predicting their futures. He shouted ‘university’ for some bright pupils, but when he arrived at Danny, he said, ‘maybe university’. Our author had previously been asked if he wanted to sit the Eleven-Plus exam, which could lead to a place at grammar school in Nottingham, but his mum stamped on the idea with her usual care and aplomb, ‘Ow y’ goona get t’Nottin’ham every day? Ooh’s goona pay forritt?’ while dad remained silent. Escaping the ‘drip-drip’ of chaos So to the Matthew Holland Comprehensive School it was, where Danny revelled at the books he could borrow from the linked public library and where he remained a ‘Clever Bugger’ in the top sets. He was not above taking the mickey out of those in the ‘remedial’ group. He gravitated towards friends whose calm houses he could visit, even stay at, to escape his own home which was characterised by the ‘drip-drip of low-key chaos’. We are aware by now that his mum was blind but completely in denial about it, while his dad did everything he could to build a relationship with his son despite his long shifts down the pit and steadily failing health. A heritage of struggle: from D.H. Lawrence to 1984 The hero behind the name of Danny’s secondary school, Matthew Holland, had been a miner who agitated to the point where he lost his job. He then campaigned for better schooling for the underprivileged and also championed the Workers’ Education Association, rising through the ranks to become chair of the Nottinghamshire County Education Committee. The other local hero was D. H. Lawrence who also came from a mining family but won a scholarship to a ‘posh school. Somebody stumped up the money that allowed him to learn!’ The ‘no lament’ paradox Mr Hall, a teacher at Matthew Holland School tried to persuade Danny’s parents to let him stay on at Sixth Form, but Danny’s mum was having none of it. He then introduced Danny to Kev Patterson, a draughtsman at a local engineering firm, who talked about his own dad declining promotion and remaining at the coalface all his life for fear of being ostracised by his friends and community. Danny achieved excellent O Level results and his dad lined him up with an interview to be an apprentice engineer for the coal board. However, at the interview, the foreman explained that all new apprenticeships had been cancelled that year owing to the anticipated strike action by the miners and the news that many pits were deemed uneconomical. Making good use of the library and a friend’s address for correspondence – Danny was living itinerantly by now – he passed a local engineering firm’s IQ test with flying colours and started as an apprentice. In the book, Danny discusses at length what he felt about not being able to stay on at Sixth Form or have a crack higher education. I anticipated some sort of lament here – but Danny racked his brains so that he could be true to his feelings of more than four decades ago and concluded that there was no lingering sense of disappointment. Scaling Opportunities: where policy meets the pit I read Scott’s book alongside Charlotte Gleed and Charlotte Armstrong’s Scaling Opportunities published by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), and the two make perfect companions. Scott’s book is all about the character, culture and emotions of a bright young person whose odds of progressing to further, let alone higher education, are slim. The HEPI report provides the statistics and analytical framing for low higher education participation rates. There were one or two individuals, like teachers and librarians, who tried to provide opportunities for Danny to go further in education, but seemingly no systematic interventions of the type that Gleed and Armstrong recommend. What would have happened if Danny’s parents – especially his beleaguered mother – had been the recipient of ‘long-term engagement’ from educational professionals? While Danny’s mother is a relatively extreme example, she reminded me of some of the survey findings and comments made in the focus groups that the UPP Foundation conducted as part of its Widening Participation Inquiry last year about higher education not being an aspiration for some. Scott’s book reinforces just how powerful cultures made up of school bullies; teachers spouting careless words; communities with really tough lives; and exhausted and disabled parents can be in holding the next generation back. In this context, even the best laid scaling opportunity plans are up against it. And the book reminds us too – as autobiographies are want to do – of the roles of personal resilience and serendipity in where life takes us. Conclusion: the power of the clean break In the end, Danny escapes Nottinghamshire and gets to London through wit and drive. I learned from a podcast interview how important a step this was for him, and he is not alone in appreciating the chance to leave his hometown. Opportunities to relocate, to reinvent yourself, connect with new people and ideas, and to find and follow your passions resonate with me too. For people in closed communities like Selston, the physical act of moving away to university can be the best, and sometimes the only way, to break free. I am proud to represent UPP – a provider of on-campus student accommodation in partnership with 14 learning UK universities – which provides a stepping stone for many looking for their new chapter. The chance to go further, forge new paths and live in a different environment is an undeniable foundation for future success. 1970s Selston and a small number of modern-day focus-groups in Doncaster provide but a snapshot of views about education and are not the whole picture of course. My own grandmother hailed from Doncaster and packed fireworks for a living, yet she was keen for her daughters to do the best they could in further and higher education, for example. But negativity is strongly felt in pockets and the higher education sector cannot ignore this. Get our updates via email Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Email Address Subscribe The post WEEKEND READING: ‘There’s no point wishin’ fo’ owt’’: What can we learn from Danny Scott’s 2025 book, The Undisputed King of Selston, about widening access to higher – indeed to any – education? appeared first on HEPI .
10 May 2026
New missions to transform childhoods of most disadvantaged
New education missions launched to open doors for children in the most under-served communities
9 May 2026
New missions to transform childhoods of most disadvantaged
New education missions launched to open doors for children in the most under-served communities
9 May 2026
New missions to transform childhoods of most disadvantaged
New education missions launched to open doors for children in the most under-served communities
9 May 2026
New missions to transform childhoods of most disadvantaged
New education missions launched to open doors for children in the most under-served communities
9 May 2026
New missions to transform childhoods of most disadvantaged
New education missions launched to open doors for children in the most under-served communities
9 May 2026
Teachers in England to vote on striking over pay
The National Education Union says it will hold a formal ballot this autumn without "urgent action".
9 May 2026
‘It’s about recognising our role in history’: Bradford exhibition to revisit live Somali display
At the city’s Great Exhibition of 1904, 57 Somali men, women and children cooked, weaved and danced for visitors It was, the posters said, a rare chance to see a “little known but interesting people”: a live display of 57 Somali men, women and children who cooked, weaved and danced for the entertainment of hundreds of thousands of Edwardians who flocked to Yorkshire to see them. More than 120 years later, this controversial – and, in its time, incredibly popular – show will be revisited in a new exhibition in Bradford that will put Britain’s colonial legacy under the spotlight. Continue reading...
9 May 2026
WEEKEND READING: Beyond access: how subject-linked maintenance grants will reshape opportunity
This blog was kindly authored by Sunday Blake, Policy Manager, GuildHE. The proposal to reinstate full maintenance grants for students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds is a positive step, and even now that the dust has settled on this policy announcement, it is still, rightfully, being celebrated across the sector. The move is one which recognises and addresses something many voices in higher education have been arguing for years: that for poorer students, living cost support is not simply a marginal incentive but a basic condition of access to higher education. It is though, important to note that this move is technically not a ‘return’ to maintenance grants – as it has been widely reported. While there is a reintroduction of maintenance grants, they come with a significant shift in eligibility. Such eligibility is not satisfied solely on a student’s socioeconomic background or personal circumstances (as before) but now under the new the system eligibility for maintenance grants is based, not just on where the student comes from, but where they also intend to go. This is because eligibility has been narrowed to a set of ‘priority’ subjects defined by the government’s industrial strategy – a shift that places a number of disciplines, including many creative degrees, outside the scope of the new grants. In this way, maintenance funding has been reframed from a neutral enabler of broad participation into a lever designed to steer the choices of some students towards what the government thinks they should study. Subjects of support In practice, this means that a number of disciplines fall outside the scope of the reintroduced grants. Eligible subjects are expected to include STEM and technical disciplines, health and public service professions, teacher training, and subjects aligned with priority sectors such as construction and architecture, advanced manufacturing, digital technologies, and energy and green technology. Subjects outside these priority areas are unlikely to be eligible. This is expected to include many creative arts disciplines, as well as a range of humanities, social sciences, and business-related degrees. Students choosing these subjects would rely solely on the loan system for living cost support; on parent contribution; their own income from working whilst studying; or not be able study these subjects at all. Such an approach makes sense in principle when designing for national skills needs – more on that later – but it sits uneasily alongside the participation principles that the government itself applies elsewhere. Opportunity for all The concern that access to certain subjects and careers is shaped by the students’ ability to absorb financial risk – and the actions to mitigate this – are already well established in other areas of policy For example, there is already a broad and welcome consensus in government and incoming policy, reflected clearly in the Making Work Pay consultation, that unpaid internships are unfair. This is not just because of the concern young people who are working in such unpaid internships are exploited – but also because of concerns for young people who aren’t working in such unpaid internships. The logic is, that unpaid internships are unfair and exclusionary because being able to afford to do an unpaid internship (and reap the benefits it offers) rests on a level of financial security that those from low socio-economic backgrounds may not have. The Government articulates this clearly in its consultation and its commitment to ban them “for a fair and inclusive labour market where everyone has the opportunity to succeed based on their talent and not their financial circumstances.” In short: some employers misuse internship structures to get free labour, especially from the young people who can afford to perform it, and that isn’t fair on those involved. Equally, unpaid internships create barriers for those without financial support who cannot afford to perform unpaid labour, which widens class divides in career access, and that isn’t fair, either. The former concern is about exploitation; the latter concern is about who gets to access opportunities and who does not. This matters particularly for the creative industries, where research shows that unpaid or underpaid internships are common entry-level pathways – and that these practices act as a barrier to social mobility for students and graduates from lower socio-economic backgrounds . Many graduates are expected to complete multiple placements before securing stable work. Unsurprisingly, those from higher-income backgrounds are far more likely to manage this. Those from working-class backgrounds participate at much lower rates. This is not because of a lack of will or ability, but because the economics simply do not work. Talent or trust fund? Against that backdrop, creative higher education actually plays a disproportionate role in supporting social mobility. Sutton Trust research shows that while only around 20 per cent of working class people in employment hold a degree, the figure is three times as many for working class people in creative occupations. In other words, a degree is often the primary – and sometimes only – route into creative careers for those without family wealth or networks. Subject-restricted maintenance funding will raise the same issue. Where access to financial support, through grants, is unevenly attached to particular routes, the effect is not simply to ‘nudge’ choices but to determine who can participate at all. That is why access to creative higher education matters so much if widening participation is meant to extend beyond education and into the labour market. Skills design Now, about that skills design. GuildHE research shows that creative degrees develop technical, entrepreneurial, and transferable skills that support portfolio careers, self-employment and innovation across the wider economy, not just within the creative industries themselves. These are not low-value pathways. They are simply non-linear ones. Creative graduates move across sectors: digital, design, communications, education, public service, technology and policy. This is vital workplace and career adaptability. In a labour market defined by change, creative education builds exactly the kind of flexible capability that priority sectors consistently say they need – even if current funding models struggle to recognise it. There is also a strategic timing issue at play. The current proposal responds to immediate and visible skills shortages. But higher education is not a rapid response unit. Students entering university now will graduate into an economy several years on – one with shifted skills needs. Funding models that lock participation to today’s priorities risk training students for today’s – or even yesterday’s – gaps, rather than the future economy. Even The Robbins Report committee found “no reliable basis” for such forecasts back in the 1960s. In contrast to narrowly defined pipelines, creative routes produce graduates who can move with the economy rather than chase it. In periods of rapid change, such adaptability is a form of resilience that the wider economy depends on. And underpinning all of this depends on students entering higher education in the first place. Maintenance funding does not always operate as a gentle incentive at the margins of subject choice. A student who has grown up drawing, designing, performing or making does not respond to the removal of maintenance support by ‘re-optimising’ into a priority subject. A fantastic artist who cannot go to university to study art does not suddenly become a fantastic engineer. They do not go to university. And once they are priced out, they do not later reappear in Government-defined priority sectors. That talent is simply lost. The pipeline problem The government has rightly committed to rebuilding creative curricula in schools and has recognised the role of the arts and culture in prosperity and placemaking. Aligning maintenance funding with those ambitions would help avoid unintended consequences for social mobility and ensure that skills strategy widens – rather than narrows – the talent pipeline. And if the aim is to increase participation in priority fields, there is scope to look at a broader and more effective set of levers: earlier investment in the pipeline; stronger careers guidance; better supported transitions; and reducing the overall financial risk of participation. It is also worth asking how incentives are distributed across income groups. If financial pressure is used to encourage students who rely on maintenance support to choose priority subjects, are there equivalent mechanisms nudging more affluent students in the same direction? Or does the policy operate mainly by narrowing the choices of those who can least afford the risk? Maintenance funding works best when it enables participation, not when it becomes a sorting mechanism that determines whose aspirations are financially viable. Across other areas of policy – from action on unpaid internships to wider commitments on fair access to work – the government has recognised that opportunity should not depend on a young person’s financial security. If widening participation is truly meant to extend beyond access to higher education and into the labour market, that same principle must apply here too. The ability to study – including through creative routes – must remain financially possible for those without the luxury of choice. Get our updates via email Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Email Address Subscribe The post WEEKEND READING: Beyond access: how subject-linked maintenance grants will reshape opportunity appeared first on HEPI .
9 May 2026
Discurso da Comissária Albuquerque nas comemorações do Dia da Europa
European Commission Discurso Porto, 09 May 2026 Senhor Presidente da Câmara do Porto, Pedro Duarte, Senhora Secretária de Estado dos Assuntos Europeus, Inês Domingos, Minhas Senhoras e Meus Senhores, É um gra...
8 May 2026
Space For Inspiration In The Secondary School Curriculum
The post Space For Inspiration In The Secondary School Curriculum appeared first on TeachingTimes .
8 May 2026
Candidates to the EUNIS Board of Directors 2026/27
Meet the 2026 EUNIS Board candidates! The EUNIS Board plays a key role in shaping the future of digital transformation across European higher education. Every year, new candidates step forward—ready to contribute, collaborate, and amplify the voice of our community. This year is no exception. The 2026 General Assembly takes place on 4 June 2026 during the EUNIS26 Congress at the West University of Timisoara, Romania . All staff of EUNIS member organisations are entitled to take part in the GA meeting. The representatives of European Higher Education and Research institutions ( regular members ) in good standing (i.e. having paid their annual membership fee) vote to elect the new Board. Get to know the inspiring individuals stepping up this year—each bringing unique perspectives and a shared commitment to advancing EUNIS’s mission. Read full candidate statements by clicking on their name: Standing for re-election: Carmen Díaz Romero , (SIGMA AIE, Spain) “I firmly believe that Europe must have a common digitisation strategy that is firmly established in all Member States.” New candidates: Ilja Afanasjevs ( Higher Education and Science Information Technology Shared Service Centre, Latvia) “ I want to help EUNIS thrive as a “trusted voice” and community where members share real-world solutions and support each other’s growth.” Andreas Herceg ( University of Bern, Switzerland) “My passion is making complex data and processes clear and manageable. ” Laurent Flory (Groupe Logiciel – Cellule Nationale Logicielle, French Ministry of Higher Education and Research, France) “I believe transformation succeeds when trust and cooperation come first.” Giuliano Pozza , (Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Italy) “I do believe that to empower EUNIS professionals we need to add, to everytthing wonderful we are already doing, a new strategic initiative: DEEEP (Development of EUNIS Education and Empowerement Plan).” Interested in joining the EUNIS Board yourself in the future? Speak to a Board member or stop by the EUNIS booth in Timisoara!
8 May 2026
Integrated digital finance regulation: lessons from Kigali
One market, many regulators: the coordination gap Maria has no choice: she’s going to miss her monthly payment on her small-dollar loan by a few days. It has been a hard spell for her hairdressing business and the price of her son’s medicines unexpectedly doubled. But within minutes of missing her payment, the digital company that made her loan has messaged her friends, her mother and her pastor and posted on Maria’s own social media accounts – embarrassing messages saying “I’m a deadbeat” and worse. When Maria applied for her loan, she unwittingly gave the lender access to her phone’s data, manipulated by dark patterns and other tricks to surrender her most sensitive personal data and applications. Now that lender is deploying it in a campaign of humiliation and harassment, compounding Maria’s misery. This is a real phenomenon, one that has only grown more widespread and severe as hundreds of millions of consumers across the developing world have gained access to digital tools. And it’s one that continues to persist in part because of the lack of coordination and collaboration between the 2 regulatory sectors most directly empowered to stop it – data protection and financial services. Digital financial services have transformed how hundreds of millions of people save, borrow and pay. Mobile money and digital credit are expanding access to formal finance at a pace that would have seemed implausible a decade ago. Yet the overlapping regulatory frameworks governing these services are not always keeping up with technology – or with each other. Data protection regulators and financial regulators operate under separate mandates, enforcing different laws and working in distinct institutional cultures. In practice, this means the same providers, products and transactions are subject to multiple requirements on data collection, retention, consent and sharing – requirements that are not always straightforward to reconcile and are sometimes in tension. Navigating this fragmented landscape raises compliance costs and creates uncertainty; this falls hardest on the smallest and newest companies, with downstream consequences for competition and innovation. For consumers, fragmented regulation can mean unclear rights and redress and gaps in supervision and enforcement can leave open opportunities for predatory digital lending, fraud and unchecked data harvesting. These are not abstract concerns. Credit-shaming practices – where digital lenders demand broad access to a borrower’s contacts and social media, then use that access for invasive debt collection – have been documented across Africa and Asia . Fraud is surging and the tensions between data minimisation principles and financial regulators’ requirements to collect and retain data (eg for anti-money laundering and credit assessment) and what that means for use and sharing of those data, remain largely unresolved . These are the challenges that brought more than 50 participants from data protection authorities, central banks, international organisations and the private sector across Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe to Kigali, Rwanda on 9 March 2026 for a full-day cross-regulatory workshop. Convened by Financial Innovation for Impact (Fii) and the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) at Cambridge Judge Business School, with support from the Gates Foundation, the workshop (conducted under the Chatham House Rule) was part of a broader research programme examining how data protection and financial regulation intersect in the governance of digital financial services, both globally and with a focus on 10 developing countries. Panelists at Kigali workshop. Participants at Kigali workshop. What we heard: 6 key takeaways 1 Privacy and financial inclusion are not in competition The central message of the day was that data protection and financial inclusion must be designed together, not traded off against each other. Fragmented regulation creates the illusion of a choice between the 2. In reality, privacy safeguards can underpin the trust that drives adoption of formal financial services, while well-designed financial regulation can create the data governance conditions under which responsible innovation thrives. The challenge is one of regulatory design, not a tug-of-war between competing objectives. 2 Trust is a systemic property, not a product feature Participants returned repeatedly to the idea that trust cannot be engineered by individual firms or regulators alone. It is a property of the system as a whole: dependent on institutional credibility, consumer understanding and accountability frameworks working in concert. Digital finance and the regulatory framework that supports it, must offer real assurances to earn consumers’ trust or risk a reversion to cash or informal channels, a trend some participants reported as already visible in their jurisdictions. 3 Coordination is broadly desired but structurally difficult There is genuine appetite for cross-regulatory collaboration, but significant obstacles remain. Siloed mandates, capacity gaps, different institutional cultures and legal vocabularies and the absence of mechanisms to sustain coordination beyond initial memoranda of understanding all make joined-up oversight harder than it sounds. Promising case studies were discussed as instructive, though participants were clear that context matters and no model transfers wholesale. 4 Standards can be a powerful coordination tool Standard-setting activity emerged as a potential multi-purpose instrument: motivating regulatory coordination, shaping market behaviour and serving as a platform for regional harmonisation. Participants shared an expansive view of what standards could achieve, while cautioning against overly prescriptive approaches that ignore local capacity constraints. Joint guidance between data protection and financial regulators was identified as a practical near-term step that could signal alignment and reduce uncertainty for market participants. 5 Cross-border harmonisation is vital but must respect local context Concrete examples brought the benefits of harmonisation to life, both in and beyond the financial sector context. But harmonisation was also treated with caution: participants warned against top-down approaches that ignore domestic legal frameworks and institutional realities. Adequacy determinations, which govern whether personal data can be transferred between jurisdictions, were singled out as a particularly intractable but consequential area, with real-world examples of absent adequacy arrangements impeding fintech operations and regional expansion. 6 Capacity is the binding constraint Across virtually every topic, participants returned to the challenge of limited institutional capacity: within regulators, the judiciary, law enforcement and among consumers. Many data protection authorities are less than a decade old, operating on small budgets and carrying less institutional weight than central banks with decades of established authority. Building capacity was seen as a precondition for effective coordination, not a secondary concern. Participants challenged conventional training approaches, advocating instead for peer exchange, secondments across regulatory areas and learning embedded in practice. What comes next: first steps towards joined-up regulation One of the clearest messages from Kigali was that coordination should not be pursued as an abstract procedural exercise. It is most likely to succeed – and to build lasting institutional muscle in the process – when organised around specific, urgent problems. Fraud and open finance were identified as the most promising entry points: domains where the case for joint regulatory action is immediate, the potential benefits are tangible and the political conditions for cooperation are most favourable. We also heard a strong call for an evidence-based coordination blueprint: a diagnostic and roadmap tool that helps regulators assess where they stand, prioritise next steps and measure progress over time. Treating coordination as a maturity journey, in which foundational steps enable and reinforce more ambitious ones, was a framing that resonated across the room. Participants at the Kigali workshop. Get involved These insights will feed directly into CCAF and Fii’s globe-spanning initiative-tackling the join-up of data protection and financial regulation, which will lay out practical, context-sensitive recommendations for strengthening cross-regulatory coordination at the national, regional and global levels. Future workshops will deepen the analysis of specific thematic areas and test emerging findings. In parallel, CCAF and Fii are conducting country-level assessments of our 10 focus jurisdictions, mapping global initiatives and developing a quantifiable framework to assess the harms and missed opportunities created by regulatory fragmentation. The programme’s learnings will be consolidated into a comprehensive report due to be published in the latter half of this year. If you are a regulator, policymaker, researcher or practitioner working at the intersection of data protection and financial services, we want to hear from you. The research programme is actively seeking input on the practical coordination challenges that regulators face in their jurisdictions and on the thematic areas explored in this workshop. Contact the team at [email TBC] and join CCAF’s mailing list for updates on the programme and forthcoming publications. About the Kigali workshop The Kigali workshop was conducted under the Chatham House Rule. This post reflects the substance of the discussions without attributing views to individual participants or organisations. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Gates Foundation, the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, the University of Cambridge, or Financial Innovation for Impact. Featured authors Max Bentovim Data Protection Lead, Financial Innovation for Impact (Fii) Yue Wu Data Scientist, Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) Tanya Ghuman Research Analyst, Financial Innovation for Impact (Fii) [Additional authors TBC] Further reading Read our report on the intersection of digital public infrastructure and digital finance . Read our report on the future of global fintech . Learn more about Financial Innovation for Impact . Join our mailing list Hear from the CCAF across the year, including details on our upcoming events and report launches. Sign up Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance Driven by its mission to create and transfer knowledge addressing emergent gaps in the financial sector that supports evidence-based decision-making, the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) is a research centre at Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. Learn more about CCAF Related articles Finance and accounting Where AI meets blockchain: assets, agents and blind spots An analysis of AI and blockchain convergence, covering compute infrastructure, crypto assets, autonomous agents and emerging policy challenges by Wenbin Wu, Research Associate at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance. Read more Finance and accounting Crypto privacy after sanctions – the return of coin mixers Crypto mixers are back but different, say Wenbin Wu and Keith Bear from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF), Cambridge Judge Business School. After 2022 sanctions scattered the market, compliant privacy protocols now dominate. Read more Insight Why quantum matters now for blockchain Industry leaders face a choice: act now or risk the integrity of blockchain-based markets and digital currencies, says Wenbin Wu, Research Associate at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF), Cambridge Judge Business School. Here we reveal regulators’ and policymakers’ bridging roles for quantum-resilient blockchains, and the importance of collaboration by technologists, economists, and regulators in the quantum age of financial technology. Read more The post Integrated digital finance regulation: lessons from Kigali appeared first on Cambridge Judge Business School .
8 May 2026
South Korea in post-study visa push amid shift towards quality
South Korea’s Ministry of Justice has adopted eight new visa-related proposals aimed at easing workforce shortages and attracting more international students and professionals, while also launching a broader rethink of the country’s international student visa system. The ministry said the reforms come as South Korea entered the “300,000 international student era”, with official data showing 314,397 international students as of February 2026, Meanwhile, the adopted measures include eased D-4 trainee visa requirements, expanded post-study pathways for overseas graduates and a new “gap year” route for OECD high school graduates. At the same time, the ministry has launched a new public-private consultative body to redesign Korea’s international student visa framework, with final recommendations expected in August ahead of policy discussions in November. The Justice Ministry will continue to listen to voices from the field so that immigration and visa policies can respond to changes in Korea’s industrial and demographic structure and help revitalise local economies Jung Sung-ho, Korean justice minister In its announcement, the ministry acknowledged that previous international student policy had focused too heavily on expanding numbers, with insufficient attention paid to improving student quality and integration outcomes. “Until now, international student policy has focused heavily on expanding scale (300,000 students), while discussion around improving student quality remained insufficient,” the ministry said in a statement translated by The PIE News . The ministry added that the new direction would combine “strategic quality management” with “expanded post-graduation opportunities”, while creating a “growth ladder visa system” allowing international students to move more smoothly from study to employment and long-term settlement in Korea. “The Ministry of Justice will continue to listen to voices from the field so that immigration and visa policies can respond to changes in Korea’s industrial and demographic structure and help revitalise local economies,” said justice minister Jung Sung-ho. The latest reforms come nearly a month after The PIE reported growing concerns around sustainability and post-study outcomes following Korea’s rapid rise in international student numbers. Kyuseok Kim, director of IES Abroad’s Seoul centre, told The PIE that the ministry’s latest measures appeared to reflect a more balanced direction for Korea’s internationalisation strategy. “The ministry’s own documents explicitly acknowledge that Korea’s international student policy has been too focused on reaching 300,000 students, while quality, academic readiness and post-graduation integration have received insufficient attention,” stated Kim. He said some narrower administrative measures could begin this year, particularly pilot or limited reforms, though broader student-related changes would likely move more gradually through the ministry’s ongoing consultation process. “The key checks should include pilot quotas, clear eligibility criteria, labour-market and wage safeguards, institutional accountability, Korean-language and student-support capacity, and transparent publication of outcomes before any expansion,” he added. Kim said the measures were “a step in the right direction” because they begin linking visas more closely to employability, language capacity and post-study outcomes rather than treating international students “only as a numerical enrolment target”. However, he cautioned that structural concerns around over-recruitment and integration still remain.“To address over-recruitment, Korea will need stronger public indicators on retention, completion, language progression, employment outcomes, regional absorptive capacity, student welfare and agency practices,” he said. Jee Suk (Jay) Kang, director of academic relations at Pulley Campus by Freewheelin, said the latest reforms appeared more targeted than previous vocational high school recruitment proposals, with many of the measures applying only to specific cases or institutions. “These eight policy changes are mostly very specific for certain cases,” said Kang, adding that the adopted measures formed only part of a wider set of 20 proposals currently under discussion and that “it might be more interesting to check what those not-selected 12 proposals were”. Among the most notable education-related changes is the easing of work experience and Korean-language requirements for students enrolling in Sura Academy programs, an Agriculture Ministry-backed initiative designed to train international students in Korean cuisine. The ministry has also expanded visa pathways for international graduates by extending professional (E-7) and job-seeking (D-10) visa benefits to graduates from five Education Ministry-certified overseas universities. Meanwhile, high school graduates from OECD countries will be able to spend a “gap year” in Korea under an exchange student visa arrangement. A well-supported gap-year model could convert cultural interest into longer-term educational engagement, including future semester study abroad, degree mobility or graduate study in Korea Kyuseok Kim, director of IES Abroad Kim described the proposal as potentially significant if implemented carefully. “Korea already has strong cultural visibility among younger students, but many in OECD countries do not yet understand Korea as a serious academic destination,” he said. “A well-supported gap-year model could convert cultural interest into longer-term educational engagement, including future semester study abroad, degree mobility or graduate study in Korea.” The wider package of reforms also includes extending Jeju Island’s “workcation” stay period from 30 to 90 days for eligible international nationals and adding mold technicians to occupations eligible for the E-7-3 skilled worker visa in response to manufacturing labour shortages. The post South Korea in post-study visa push amid shift towards quality appeared first on The PIE News .
8 May 2026
From volume to value: rethinking international recruitment strategy
At this year’s International Higher Education Forum (IHEF) , much of the discussion focused on the pressures facing international student recruitment: slowing demand in key markets, rising competition from established and emerging destinations, and a more volatile and politicised policy environment in the UK. But focussing too heavily on external pressures risks hiding solutions that remain within institutions’ control. The more immediate challenge lies closer to home: how universities understand cost, price their offer and define value. The volume illusion For many institutions, the default position has been to push for more volume – more students to meet higher income targets. That instinct increasingly rests on a simple assumption that more students automatically translate into more value. But that assumption is now breaking down. The cost of recruiting international students has risen significantly in recent years: agent commission, marketing spend and in-market operations are all increasing, eroding the margin that additional student volume is supposed to deliver. In some cases, universities are now paying a third or more of total tuition fee income just in commission, before accounting for other recruitment costs, and before the costs of teaching and supporting those students. The result is predictable: net revenue per student is under pressure. In some cases, once costs are fully accounted for, institutions are left with less per international student than they receive from domestic students, a level university leaders already argue is insufficient. So we have reached a point where more volume does not necessarily mean more value. In fact in some cases, institutions are scaling activity that is only marginally profitable – or worse. The problem isn’t recruiters – it’s the system It is important to say that this is not a failure of recruitment teams. If anything, the opposite is true. Many teams are operating under a set of deeply conflicting signals: volume targets that continue to rise; pressure to discount through scholarships to remain competitive; competition on agent commission to secure pipeline; and expectations from senior leadership around margin, quality, diversification and ‘responsible recruitment’. These objectives are not inherently incompatible, but they are rarely aligned in practice. The result is a familiar pattern: a race to the bottom on in-year discounts; a race to the top on commission; and no clear framework for managing the trade-offs between them. The result is a familiar pattern: a race to the bottom on in-year discounts; a race to the top on commission; and no clear framework for managing the trade-offs between them The cost of acquisition problem At the heart of this issue is a more fundamental weakness: a lack of clarity about cost. Across the institutions I have worked with in recent years, three patterns are common: no single, integrated view of cost of acquisition; limited attribution of costs by market or recruitment channel; pricing decisions made without a clear understanding of the underlying cost base. Even where data exists, it is often fragmented across functions: marketing spend that is difficult to link to specific outcomes; uncoordinated scholarship budgets spread across central and academic units; staffing deployed on fixed regional plans; commission structures locked into contracts and only visible after enrolment In short, costs are rarely integrated, coordinated or actively managed. And this has a direct consequence: if you do not understand your cost of acquisition, you do not have a strategy but rather a series of activities. The illusion of pricing complexity If cost is poorly understood, it is unsurprising that pricing is underdeveloped. Despite the apparent complexity of international portfolios, most universities operate with a relatively small number of fee points across hundreds of programs. Yet pricing is still typically set through an annual committee routine: benchmarking against last year’s competitors; applying an inflationary uplift; and rolling that forward across the portfolio. This approach assumes: stable demand, stable competition and consistent perceptions of value. None of which now hold. As a result, pricing is often: weakly linked to demand; disconnected from cost of acquisition; and insufficiently aligned to institutional strategy. In other words, we behave as pricing complex but in practice use it as blunt instrument. The levy as a forcing function The introduction of a levy on international students in England adds a new dimension to this discussion but it does not fundamentally change it. Instead, it makes the issues harder to ignore. By attaching an explicit additional cost to each international student, the levy forces institutions to think more carefully about net revenue after costs. And once institutions start thinking in those terms, the need to align pricing, cost of acquisition and recruitment strategy becomes much more immediate. From volume to value So where does this leave us? The challenges facing international recruitment are real. But responding to them through ever-increasing volume is unlikely to provide a sustainable solution. Instead, institutions need to make a more fundamental shift: from volume-driven recruitment to value-driven strategy. This means: treating cost of acquisition as a core management metric, not a by-product; using pricing deliberately to achieve strategic priorities, not as an annual benchmarking exercise; making explicit trade-offs between volume, margin, diversity and quality; aligning financial, academic and recruitment objectives around a shared definition of value. Without that shift, institutions risk continuing to chase volume in ways that do not deliver value or sustainability. Universities cannot control demand, policy or competition, but they can control how they price, manage cost and define value. The post From volume to value: rethinking international recruitment strategy appeared first on The PIE News .
8 May 2026
Sexual harassment more than twice as prevalent at England’s top universities, analysis finds
Harassment reported by 35% of students at ‘high tariff’ institutions compared with 17% at those with lowest entry grades Students at England’s leading universities were more than twice as likely to experience sexual harassment than those at “lower tariff” institutions, according to analysis. Data from a national survey of undergraduates shows that 35% of students at “high tariff” universities – those requiring the highest A-level grades for entry – reported experiencing sexual harassment, compared with just over 17% of those at universities requiring the lowest grades for entry and 26% of those at “medium tariff” institutions. Continue reading...
8 May 2026
EU leaders discuss peace and stability at 8th EPC Summit and take EU-Armenia partnership to a whole new level
European Commission News Brussels, 08 May 2026 The President of the Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, was in Yerevan on the 4 and 5 May to attend the eighth Summit of the European Political Community as w...
8 May 2026
Advancing Shared Education - Report to the Northern Ireland Assembly May 2026
Advancing Shared Education - Report to the Northern Ireland Assembly May 2026 Date published: 8 May 2026 catherwoodd Fri, 08/05/2026 - 15:27 Advancing Shared Education - Report to the Northern Ireland Assembly May 2026 File Shared Education 5th Report to the Assembly 2026.pdf Adobe PDF (1.85 MB)
8 May 2026
Luxury brands have a language for uncertainty – not a strategy
The luxury industry has built an elegant vocabulary for navigating change including “strategic oscillation”, “temporal calibration” and “legacy-driven adaptation”. Jinju Heo argues that beneath the language lies an uncomfortable truth: most luxury brands are confusing narrative agility with strategic agility. The difference may cost them the next decade. Climate urgency, geopolitical realignment and generational value shifts are converging on the luxury industry at a pace its strategies were not built to handle. Executives at heritage houses like Hermès, LVMH and Kering speak fluently about balancing tradition and innovation, preserving brand equity while embracing digital transformation and about sustainability as an extension of craftsmanship. The frameworks are sophisticated and the case studies are compelling. Hermès grew 8.5 per cent during the global financial crisis by refusing to compromise on exclusivity. Gucci was reborn under Alessandro Michele through radical creative disruption. Porsche entered electrification with the Taycan without abandoning its performance identity. All three approaches worked and were right for their contexts. And all are now cited so routinely in strategy discussions that they have become something close to mythology: stories that luxury executives tell themselves to justify whatever they were already planning to do. This is the real paradox facing luxury brands today. The industry has become exceptionally skilled at producing frameworks for managing uncertainty. It has become far less skilled at actually doing so. The seduction of strategic vocabulary When Bain and Company reports that Gen Z consumers will account for roughly a third of luxury purchases by 2030, and EY finds that 71 per cent of luxury clients rank product quality as their primary purchase motivation, the strategic conclusion seems clear: serve both constituencies simultaneously. Build the slow craft processes, apprenticeships, archives and supplier networks that signal heritage, while also building agile digital engagement mechanisms. Invest in temporal calibration: getting heritage’s generational rhythm and digital culture’s weekly cadence to play in time. This is sensible advice. It is also, in practice, nearly impossible to execute. But this difficulty is rarely acknowledged. The luxury industry’s dominant strategic vocabulary has evolved to make complexity sound manageable. Concepts like “ strategic oscillation ”, the iterative movement between tradition and innovation without eroding core brand values, are genuinely useful analytical lenses. The Strategic Calibration Framework , which identifies temporal calibration, strategic oscillation and legacy-driven adaptation as three interdependent mechanisms for brand resilience, represents rigorous thinking about a genuinely difficult problem. But frameworks describe what successful navigation looks like after the fact. They are considerably less useful as real-time decision tools when a competitor launches in the metaverse, a sustainability scandal breaks or a generational shift in taste accelerates faster than anyone anticipated. The risk is that luxury strategists conflate the ability to articulate a framework with the ability to execute it. Take Balenciaga’s strategy under creative director Demna Gvasalia of viral, deliberately ephemeral marketing: a ten-minute Simpsons episode in place of a catwalk show, runway spectacles staged in mud pits and simulated snowstorms. Describing this strategy as “temporal calibration” is intellectually satisfying. It does not tell you, in advance, which ephemeral content will enhance brand equity, and which will produce a reputational crisis. The framework is applied retrospectively to explain outcomes that were, in real time, bets. The sustainability tension is more acute than it appears Nowhere is this gap between framework and execution more visible than in sustainability, and nowhere is the luxury industry’s self-narrative more fragile. The conventional position, that sustainability can be positioned as an extension of craftsmanship rather than a concession to activism, is elegant and partly true. Hermès does frame environmental responsibility through the lens of quality and longevity. Repair services, leather regeneration programmes and product durability are authentically consistent with the brand’s century-old identity. The logic holds. But this framing, however skillfully deployed, is also a strategic convenience. Sustainability often requires transparency about supply chains, production volumes and material sourcing at exactly the scale that undermines perceptions of exclusivity. The circular economy, taken seriously, does not merely ask luxury brands to repair what they sell. It asks them to interrogate how much they produce, whether the business model of controlled scarcity is compatible with genuine circularity and what happens to brand mystique when EU sustainability rules, like the digital product passports mandatory for fashion from 2027, force provenance fully into the open. These are not questions the current strategic vocabulary is designed to answer. Legacy-driven adaptation, using historical values as strategic anchors while selectively embedding operational flexibility, provides a coherent way to describe what brands like Hermès and Prada are doing. It does not resolve the fundamental tension between an industry built on aspiration and material desire and a sustainability agenda that, at its most rigorous, asks consumers to buy less. The measurement problem nobody wants to discuss The luxury industry’s metrics remain largely unequal to the strategic challenges it faces. Brand equity, price premium and customer lifetime value are well-established measures, and proposals to add resilience indicators, such as adaptation latency (how quickly a brand responds to disruption), brand consistency scores (how coherent its identity stays across that response) and generational engagement balance (how well it holds older clients while attracting younger ones), represent a genuine improvement. But these metrics share a common limitation: they measure performance against an organisation’s own stated identity and strategy. They do not measure whether that identity and strategy are adequate to the environmental, geopolitical and generational pressures converging on the sector. A brand can score exceptionally well on heritage leverage ratio and brand consistency while simultaneously failing to build the organisational capabilities needed to survive the next decade’s disruptions. The deeper problem is that genuine strategic uncertainty, the kind generated by climate urgency, geopolitical realignment and generational value shifts, cannot be managed primarily through brand-level calibration. It requires engagement with systemic conditions that no single luxury house, however skillfully led, controls. What rigorous uncertainty management actually requires None of this is an argument against strategic frameworks. The Strategic Calibration Framework, and the broader intellectual tradition it draws on, offers real analytical value. Luxury executives navigating daily operational decisions need structured ways to think about when tradition serves them and when it constrains them. But rigorous uncertainty management requires something the frameworks tend to underemphasise: institutional honesty about what you do not know and cannot control. Hermès’s crisis resilience came from saying no to discounting and trend-chasing. Gucci’s renaissance came from saying yes to creative risk. The honest lesson is not that both approaches work. It is that neither approach can be fully planned in advance. Strategic judgment in conditions of genuine uncertainty is irreducibly dependent on context, timing, and a degree of improvisation that no framework can pre-specify. The luxury brands most likely to thrive over the next decade are not those with the most sophisticated strategic vocabulary. They are those honest enough to acknowledge the limits of that vocabulary and disciplined enough to act decisively within those limits anyway. The luxury paradox is real. Managing it well begins with resisting the temptation to make it sound easier than it is. This article gives the views of the author, not the position of LSE Business Review or the London School of Economics. You are agreeing with our comment policy when you leave a comment. Image credit: Zuumy provided by Shutterstock. The post Luxury brands have a language for uncertainty – not a strategy first appeared on LSE Business Review .
8 May 2026
While you’re refreshing the results… pensions, mortgages, and the map that matters
Morning all, If you’re in the market for some pub-quiz-winning trivia, as the results roll in keep an eye on whether Labour’s defeat in the local elections is even more sizeable than the Conservative’s losses in 2019, when 1,300 seats fell out of their control, a loss of more than a quarter (27 per cent) of their previous councillors. That said, I can confidently share that I’m not the most poll-literate Curtice in town. So, please do sign up to our event next week considering the impact of these elections on the remainder of the parliament, including insights from Sir John Curtice (my dad), Yuan Yang MP and Tom McTague from the New Statesman. Keep reading to find out how the public think pensions reform should go, and why we’re letting Michael Gove off the hook. Have a great weekend, Ruth Chief Executive Resolution Foundation Don’t quit your day job. When California raised its fast-food minimum wage to $20 an hour in 2024, it significantly raised the pay of many workers provided a great experiment for assessing the impact of minimum wages. Arin Dube’s new paper produces a nerd-fest of estimates of the employment effects. All show no or modest effects and finds a margin earlier studies missed: quits collapsed. As wages rose by 7 per cent, the gap between workers’ current jobs and their outside options narrowed, leading quarterly separation rates to fall by around 3 to 6 percentage points. This mutes the employment effect even for a sector specific wage where the option for consumers and employers to switch to lower cost alternatives is available. Fewer leavers meant higher wages for burger flipping didn’t bite jobs. Pension priorities? In preparation for the Pension Commission’s first report, here’s a poll on pension priorities which asked people to rank whether policies would make them support a politician more (or less). The public’s preferred pension policies (try saying that five times fast) were to widen automatic contributions to (almost) all employees and raise employer contributions. The biggest eyebrow raiser was that more respondents backed requiring higher employee contributions than wanted to freeze the pension age at 67. But the polling did make clear the pension age freeze came with higher taxes. We have advocated raising the state pension age to 68, given fiscal constraints and the case for generational fairness. Indeed, the poll found a stark generational divide on whether we should keep the triple lock. Given the real value of the basic State Pension has grown by 19 per cent since 2010 while unemployment support has fallen by 6 per cent, the Pension Commission should address this widening divide. Abolishing the triple lock is a tough political sell, but with pensioner incomes no lower on average than working-age incomes, there is no justification for uprating them by random rachet. Pass the Factor 50. OK so maybe we planned this one before we checked the forecast for next week…but there’s always space for some interesting analysis on death by heat exposure . These authors found that about 60 per cent of the extra deaths among elderly people during heatwaves could be explained by neighbourhood-level differences in heat exposure, not just by the overall city temperature rising. Drilling into their Rio de Janeiro case study reveals that better preventative care only reduces the death toll when the heat stress is genuinely citywide – when the danger is concentrated in a few sweltering neighbourhoods with little cover, all that matters is proximity to the emergency room. Heatwaves, like real estate, are all about location. Suffering for our studies. Tougher final exams, less coursework, and mandatory resits for fails in Maths and English – can we blame Michael Gove’s reforms for the rise in poor youth mental health? It seems not. This article considers how, amidst criticisms of the new system turning schools into exam factories, Scotland diverged from Gove’s vision of a knowledge-rich curriculum. They opted instead for a skills-focused curriculum with fewer exams. Despite this, a 2022 survey found that happiness and wellbeing scores remained similar either side of the border. At the same time attainment in England improved compared to the OECD average, while Scotland saw declines. So tell the kids – don’t stress, the exams are good for you. Rate expectations. Any economics textbook can tell you that cutting interest rates boosts consumer spending. But are economists sure they know why? A new Bank of England paper uses UK administrative data on six million expiring fixed rate mortgage deals and finds that a 1 percentage point cut in mortgage rates raises consumption by about 3 per cent (c. £950) over the next 6 months. But surprisingly, most of the rise comes from households borrowing against their higher home values, rather than cashing in on higher spending power off the back of lower monthly mortgage bills. The reverse effect, the authors note, also holds. If high rates keep house prices flat this year, expect consumer spending to feel the chill too. Chart of the week As you get lost in the new political maps of the UK coming out over the next few hours and days, we wanted to add a living standards map to the picture. This week’s chart shares something I recently presented to the CEOs of the alliance of twelve Core Cities committed to working together to boost the city regions. It shows how living standards (measured as real gross disposable household income per person) have changed in those cities (and London) between 2004 and 2023. London pulls far ahead, with a 22 per cent uplift in (mean) living standards over this period. Manchester (12 per cent) and Edinburgh (8 per cent), nab silver and bronze. But even third-place Edinburgh falls below the UK wide average and things fall off rapidly after that. In fact, more than half of the Core Cities saw living standards fall in real terms over this period, with Sheffield experiencing the sharpest drop of 6 per cent. And despite Manchester’s impressive catch-up, it remains nearly £15,000 behind London in absolute terms: £17,500 per person versus London’s £32,300. Surely we can do better than that. The post While you’re refreshing the results… pensions, mortgages, and the map that matters appeared first on Resolution Foundation .
8 May 2026
Guidance: Free meals in further education guide
Guidance to help provide free meals to disadvantaged 16 to 18 year old students in further education funded institutions.
8 May 2026
Guidance: Free meals in further education guide
Guidance to help provide free meals to disadvantaged 16 to 18 year old students in further education funded institutions.
8 May 2026
Guidance: Free meals in further education guide
Guidance to help provide free meals to disadvantaged 16 to 18 year old students in further education funded institutions.
8 May 2026
Guidance: Free meals in further education guide
Guidance to help provide free meals to disadvantaged 16 to 18 year old students in further education funded institutions.
8 May 2026
Guidance: Free school meals: guidance for schools and local authorities
Guidance for schools and local authorities about providing school meals including information on free school meal eligibility.
8 May 2026
Guidance: Free school meals: guidance for schools and local authorities
Guidance for schools and local authorities about providing school meals including information on free school meal eligibility.
8 May 2026
Guidance: Free school meals: guidance for schools and local authorities
Guidance for schools and local authorities about providing school meals including information on free school meal eligibility.
8 May 2026
Guidance: Free school meals: guidance for schools and local authorities
Guidance for schools and local authorities about providing school meals including information on free school meal eligibility.
8 May 2026
How AI is shaping elections
Despite a growing focus on the impact of AI on elections, we know surprisingly little about how voters use AI to engage with politics. In a new survey of UK adults, Sayeh Yousefi , Ben Tappin and Jens Madsen find self-reported AI use for political information is widespread and may already be shaping UK elections. Enjoying this post? Then sign up to our newsletter and receive a weekly roundup of all our articles. There is widespread concern about the role of AI in elections. While we don’t know yet if all these concerns are justified, research has shown that AI can persuade people on political issues , develop convincing deepfakes and create misinformation at scale . There have been cases of deepfakes being disseminated about political candidates during an election and reports of suspected interference in elections using AI . At the same time, there are also potential positive consequences of AI on democratic participation. Chatbots may help voters better understand candidates and navigate policy debates. Indeed, compared to common alternatives (such as browsing social media), chatbots could be an improvement . Despite all the debate around risks and benefits, we still know very little about how regular people are actually using AI to engage with politics. Are people using AI primarily to fact-check claims they come across on social media, to find information on politicians who are running for office, to help them decide how to vote in an election, or something else? We expand on these questions with survey data from a quota-matched sample of UK adults we conducted in 2026 (sample size of 2,137; matched on age, gender and ethnicity). Using AI for political information We started by asking people about how frequently they use AI chatbots and AI overview – the AI-generated summary that is often provided at the top of a search page when you search for something on a browser like Google. We then asked people which AI models they used most. 93.1 per cent of respondents said they had used an AI chatbot before, with 35.7 per cent saying they use a chatbot every day and 37.1 per cent saying they use a chatbot once or twice a week. ChatGPT was by far the most commonly used Chatbot, with 75.9 per cent of respondents reporting using it, followed by Gemini (29.7 per cent) and Copilot (27.2 per cent). Next, we asked people where they get their political information . The Internet was the most popular source of political information (65.6 per cent), followed by television (42.9 per cent), newspapers (40.7 per cent) and social media (38 per cent). Interestingly, 20.3 per cent of respondents said they use AI chatbots to find political information, and 24.6 per cent said they get political information from AI Overview. In a 2024 study , they ask the same question of UK adults and find that 9 per cent of respondents used AI chatbots as a source of political information. Although our data is from a different sample, this suggests that using AI to find political information may have more than doubled since July 2024. What types of political information are people using AI to find? According to our survey, most political uses of AI were to fact-check information (35.8 per cent), and most people were fact checking information they had come across on social media. The next most popular use was finding information on a specific political issue (33.5 per cent); then finding information on a politician (17.1 per cent) and information on elections or electoral processes (12.8 per cent). 4.5 per cent of respondents said they have used AI to help them decide who to vote for in an upcoming election. We also later asked people how likely they were to use AI in the future to find different kinds of political information. Here, consistent with their existing usage, we see that respondents are most open to using AI to find information on specific topics or to fact-check information. Even though people reported being least likely to use AI to help them decide how to vote, 14.1 per cent of respondents said they were open to using AI to help them decide how to vote in the future. With millions turning out to vote in the local elections of May 7 , in what’s considered to be a big litmus test for the changing political landscape in the UK, 14.1 per cent of voters potentially using AI to help them decide how to vote can be instrumental. If a growing number of voters are using AI to help them decide how to vote, it is extremely important for us to better understand what kinds of political information AI shares with voters, how accurate or biased it is and how that is changing over time and across AI models. How does AI political usage vary across different demographics? When we broke AI chatbot political usage down by age, we find that there are no significant differences in usage across age groups. We also broke usage down by political party, to see if there were different patterns in the sources of information people reported using to find political information across party lines. Reform UK supporters had the highest proportion of supporters who said they used AI chatbots to find political information, with 23.9 per cent reporting they use chatbots to find political information. This was closely followed by Labour (22.2 per cent), Conservatives (21.8 per cent) and Liberal Democrats (21.4 per cent), and lastly Green supporters (14 per cent). Men reported using AI chatbots as a source of political information slightly more than women (women = 18.3 per cent, men = 22.6 per cent). We also looked at how future intent to use AI for political information varied across political parties. While patterns are pretty similar across parties, Reform UK supporters were the highest proportion to say they were extremely likely to use AI across the political uses we asked about, except using AI to vote. On using AI to vote, there weren’t large differences across parties, with 5.6 per cent of Liberal Democrats saying they were extremely likely to use it, then Reform at 5.5 per cent, then Greens (4.9 per cent), then Labour (3.1 per cent), and lastly Conservatives (2.8 per cent). Do people trust political information coming from AI? People seem to be increasingly using AI as a source of political information. But we still don’t know whether they consider the information it gives them to be accurate or unbiased. When we asked participants, we found that by and large political information from AI is judged to be mostly or completely accurate. Less than 2 per cent of participants for each of the types of uses found the information to be completely inaccurate. Similarly, most people judged the responses from AI to be politically neutral. We also asked people who had asked AI for information on politicians whether the responses they got changed their attitudes on the politician. 10.1 per cent of respondents said it made them less favourable towards the politician and 9.6 per cent said it made them more favourable towards the politician. While self-reported attitude change should be taken with a grain of salt , it is worth noting that 19.7 per cent of people who had asked AI for information on politicians said they changed their attitudes towards the politician after the interaction. We finished the survey by asking respondents how much they trust different kinds of political information they get from AI. People were generally quite trusting of most kinds of political information, except information on helping with voting decisions. We also looked at general trust (across all the different types of political uses), split by political party, to see if people differed in their trust evaluations. Reform supporters were the most trusting, followed by Conservatives, while Green supporters were the most untrusting. We also asked people how much they would trust political information coming from different AI models. We find that people found ChatGPT the most trustworthy, followed by AI overview, then Copilot. Grok was the least trusted model (32.8 per cent of respondents rated it as extremely untrustworthy), followed by Meta AI (18.3 per cent rated it extremely untrustworthy). What does this mean for the future of democratic participation? Concerns about AI influencing elections through disinformation and propaganda are widespread. However, less consideration has been given to how AI now functions as a new source of political information. Our survey results show that AI is increasingly used as a source of information on politics. This poses new risks but also benefits – it can help in democratising information, allowing voters to find political information easier and with greater relevance to them. This may improve political and civic engagement. But we still know little about what kinds of political content generative AI produces and how much it varies across models. To help ensure that the benefits of AI as a source of political information outweigh the risks, it is important to understand how different AI systems are informing citizens, and how this is changing over time and across models. This research was supported by LSE SEED Grant #113098 Enjoyed this post? Sign up to our newsletter and receive a weekly roundup of all our articles. All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of LSE British Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Image credit: Lightspring on Shutterstock The post How AI is shaping elections first appeared on LSE British Politics .
8 May 2026
New students in England reminded to apply for student finance before deadline
SLC is reminding new full time undergraduate students in England to apply for their student finance before the deadline.
8 May 2026
Statutory guidance: Phonics screening check: local authority monitoring visits
Guidance for local authorities undertaking monitoring visits for the phonics screening check, including instructions for completing the monitoring visit form.
8 May 2026
Statutory guidance: Key stage 2 tests: local authority monitoring visits
Guidance for local authorities undertaking monitoring visits for the key stage 2 (KS2) national curriculum tests, including instructions for completing the KS2 monitoring visit form.
8 May 2026
Guidance: Medical guidance for DLA and AA decision makers (adult cases): staff guide
Medical guidance for DWP staff who make decisions on adult cases for Disability Living Allowance (DLA) and for Attendance Allowance (AA).
8 May 2026
Guidance: Direct Earnings Attachment: an employers' guide
Information for employers making Direct Earnings Attachment (DEA) deductions.
8 May 2026
Guidance: Free school meals expansion grant: 2026 to 2027
Methodology and conditions of grant for the 2026 to 2027 financial year.
8 May 2026
Guidance: Free school meals expansion grant: 2026 to 2027
Methodology and conditions of grant for the 2026 to 2027 financial year.
8 May 2026
Guidance: Free school meals expansion grant: 2026 to 2027
Methodology and conditions of grant for the 2026 to 2027 financial year.
8 May 2026
Guidance: Free school meals expansion grant: 2026 to 2027
Methodology and conditions of grant for the 2026 to 2027 financial year.
8 May 2026
Jacqui Smith: UK universities must prove local value
Skills minister warns universities against prioritising cashflow and “bums on seats” over quality as local communities question role of HE Danger of worsening reputation amid current political climate, with anti-immigration Reform party expected to make sweeping gains in local elections Smith vows IHEF to take complaints over lack of transparency from UKVI forward amid high visa refusal rates and upcoming crackdown on university compliance Amid waning public trust in higher education and continued political scrutiny of immigration, universities must do more to communicate their value at the local level, sector leaders have warned. Baroness Smith urged attendees of the International Higher Education Forum ( IHEF ) to demonstrate their anchor position within communities, reach out as good neighbours, and show how they contribute to UK growth both regionally and nationally. “We must be careful that we don’t do things – in parts of the sector – that frankly look as if the priority is money and bums on seats rather than quality, because that undermines the message that this is actually beneficial both internationally and to UK universities.” She added the sector must tell its own story about the “scope, influence and openness” of higher education to mitigate current scepticism, which “if we’re not careful given the political climate, will develop further in the coming years”, she warned. The comments come amid growing global debates about universities’ ‘ social licence ’ – the extent to which they are trusted and perceived as delivering public good. They were made on the eve of England’s local elections, where substantial gains by the right-wing Reform party are being hailed as “historic shifts”. Baroness Smith reiterated the Labour government’s support for the sector, vowing it is a “fundamental part of who we are as a country to have a strong higher education system”. While acknowledging “disagreements” between the sector and government, “we are absolutely partners with you”, she assured delegates. Despite consistently supportive government rhetoric, a stream of recent policy changes seeking to tighten university compliance, shorten post-study work opportunities and reduce overall net migration have increased tensions with the sector. We must be careful that we don’t do things – in parts of the sector – that frankly look as if the priority is money and bums on seats rather than quality Baroness Jacqui Smith, Department of Education Baroness Smith said such measures sought to achieve both Labour’s manifesto commitment of reducing net migration while also maintaining the UK’s globally competitive offer to international students. “The world renown of UK higher education is both a badge of pride and a responsibility for the sector to uphold.” “That, of course, means not allowing lower standards of entry to open a back door route around the immigration system, undermining the legitimacy and scholarship of the vast majority of international students.” She said the incoming international student levy for English universities made a “direct link” between the economic benefit of international students and funding to enable maintenance grants for “our most disadvantaged domestic students”. “There’s no point being internationally and nationally recognised as an enormously important asset if local people cannot access it.” Elsewhere in the conference, conversations were dominated by the forthcoming tightened BCA metrics from the Home Office, which will set new compliance standards for university recruitment, due to be implemented on June 1, 2026. Let me be clear, whether in Europe or further afield, we want the UK’s offer to be globally competitive and also aligned with our immigration and skills priorities Baroness Jacqui Smith, Department of Education Baroness Smith, who is part of the department of education, said she “honestly heard” sector complaints about lack of information sharing and transparency from UKVI, and that the department would also take these onboard. She emphasised the value that both her and Bridget Phillipson, the secretary of state for education, place on international students and the “understanding and relationship building that only comes from that opportunity to live and learn alongside one another the way students can”. “I know the sector worries about whether the whole government shares this view, particularly down the road in the Home Office… let me be clear, whether in Europe or further afield, we want the UK’s offer to be globally competitive and also aligned with our immigration and skills priorities.” The post Jacqui Smith: UK universities must prove local value appeared first on The PIE News .
8 May 2026
Preventing sexual misconduct is about risky people and places, not bulletproof policy
As OfS publishes a second cut of its sexual misconduct survey, Jim Dickinson argues the data offers providers a risk-assessment framework rather than a compliance scorecard
8 May 2026
Preventing sexual misconduct is about risky people and places, not bulletproof policy
As OfS publishes a second cut of its sexual misconduct survey, Jim Dickinson argues the data offers providers a risk-assessment framework rather than a compliance scorecard
8 May 2026
Unions win planning time for sixth form teachers
Provision for admin and rules on absence cover are added to staff conditions The post Unions win planning time for sixth form teachers first appeared on Schools Week .
8 May 2026
Teacher misconduct: attend a professional conduct panel hearing or meeting
Forthcoming professional conduct panel hearings and meetings and how to attend a hearing as an observer.
8 May 2026
Statement by Commissioner Lahbib following meeting with Lebanese President Aoun
European Commission Déclaration Beirut, 08 May 2026 Sabah el kheir ya Beyrouth. Je voudrais commencer par remercier le Président Aoun pour son accueil et pour la qualité de nos échanges. Je suis venue à Beyrouth,...
8 May 2026
Lee Owston's speech at the Schools and Academies Show
Ofsted's National Director for Education, Lee Owston, spoke at the Schools and Academies Show in London.
8 May 2026
Press release - Europeans celebrate unity, values and democracy on Europe Day 2026
On 9 May, Europeans will celebrate Europe Day. Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP
8 May 2026
The costs of limiting academic freedom
The UK High Court’s recent decision in favour of Sussex university is the latest flashpoint in an ongoing debate on academic freedom. Chirantan Chatterjee argues attempts to narrow academic debate could … Continued The post The costs of limiting academic freedom first appeared on LSE Impact .
8 May 2026
A new social contract and a revival in public funding for higher education
by Vincent Carpentier Longstanding tensions between funding and massification of higher education have significantly intensified, bringing a sense of vulnerability to the system, its institutions, staff, and students. I argue in a recent paper (Carpentier, 2026 – “Is there a case for the revival of public funding in UK higher education? Lessons from history.” Globalisation, Societies and Education , 1–9) that a relentless decline in upfront public funding derailed cost-sharing in higher education, launching a process of public-private substitution with strong implications for sustainability, stability and equity. I connect this shift to the erosion of the post-war consensus initiated by the 1973 crisis and intensified by the 2008 crisis. I discuss how revived public funding towards a reformed higher education system might contribute to and benefit from a revisited welfare state, renewing the social contract away from an increasingly unequal socioeconomic system. The long retreat of public funding Public funding was a key driver of the first phase of massification of the 1960s under a binary system shaped by universities and the public sector of higher education spearheaded by polytechnics. Grants to institutions and their students, driven by aligned political, economic, and social rationales, were considered as integral parts of the construction of the welfare state driving the post-1945 social contract. Figure 1: Income structure of higher education institutions and enrolment (universities only before 1992) UK 1921–2024. Source: Carpentier, 2026 This public investment peaked at 90% of higher education income in the early 1970s. It was then interrupted by the 1973 crisis which challenged the postwar consensus with supply side lower taxation policies seeking to limit public funding of the social sphere and encourage its privatisation. The translation of that process to higher education led at first to a slowdown in expansion in the 1980s before becoming the template of a much more marketised second phase of massification (under a newly unified system with the polytechnics having become universities in 1992). Cost-sharing – which had started with the introduction of international fees in 1967 and their rise to full-cost in 1981 – was extended to home students with the introduction of loans in 1990 and of £1K means-tested upfront fees in 1998. Differences within the UK are important to consider as Scotland abolished fees in 1999 unlike the other nations (Shattock and Horvath, 2020) . In 2006, home fees tripled to £3K and became deferred, funded by income contingent state-backed loans. What were then called ‘top-up fees’ coincided, as part of a cost-sharing agenda, with sustained grants to institutions and students: however, the share of public funding had already declined to 50% by 2008. The global crisis intensified that decline. Home fees tripled again in 2012 while teaching grants to institutions were largely scrapped in 2010. Grants to students were gradually replaced by loans and suppressed in 2016: public funding only represents 20% of institutional income today (28% if an estimation of non-refunded loans subsidised by the government is included). Shift from cost-sharing to public/private substitution of funding I argue that this concomitance of the rise in fees and reduction of grants represents a shift in the dynamic between public and private funding: fees started to replace rather than top up public funding. This process of public/private substitution, which derailed the cost-sharing agenda after the 2008 crisis, had many implications. Firstly, substitutive fees do not generate additional resources and therefore do not address issues of financial sustainability affecting institutions and their staff (Carpentier and Picard, 2024) . Moreover, substitution increased the vulnerability of institutions and the whole system which, in the absence of the shield of public funding, became over-reliant on volatile private resources such as home and international fees. Substitution also intensified a longstanding unequal institutional differentiation. The inequalities between universities and polytechnics at the heart of the binary system of the first massification of the 1960s were reproduced by those between pre/post-92 and Russell group universities of the unified system of the second phase of massification (Carpentier 2021) . Substitution also affects equity as higher fees coincided in a context of austerity with the gradual replacement of grants by increasingly less generous loan system with rising repayment costs (Callender, 2017) : this deactivated the cost-sharing mechanisms designed to mitigate for the negative impact of fees on access and students’ debt (de Gayardon and Callender, 2025 ; Ghaffar and Hordósy, 2026) . Finally, substitution affects how higher education is or is perceived: lower public funding and higher fees reflecting marketisation (Robertson and Martini, 2023) and hypercommodification (Boliver and Promenzio, 2025) slowly undermined the real and perceived public good of higher education (Marginson and Yang, 2025) while strengthening its conception as a private good. That private good was itself increasingly undermined by a falling graduate premium and unemployment (unequally according to institutions and social capital), aggravated by higher inflation and loan interest rates. Both public and private cases for higher education are now increasingly difficult to make. Inequalities and the erosion of public services and socioeconomic vulnerabilities The issues raised by substitution threatening higher education are symptomatic of wider ideological choices regarding the links between economic and human developments that characterised the post-1973 socioeconomic model. That favoured competition over collaboration, the individual over the collective, focusing on public deficit while minimizing private debt, considering social spending as a byproduct of growth rather than an investment. Those approaches shaped the growth model of the 1990s based on deregulated globalisation, financialisation and lower social protection – which generated unsustainable levels of inequality masked by private debt and cheap imported products until the explosion of the subprime market kicked off the 2008 crisis. Inequalities were initially acknowledged as a source of the crisis (Piketty, 2024) before being overlooked and intensified by austerity policies (Farnsworth and Irving, 2018) . Covid-19 showed (Tooze, 2021) the cost of not having addressed inequalities and the erosion of public services in terms of vulnerabilities of economies and societies but also demonstrated the value of what remained of the welfare state as collective shielding (Carpentier, 2021) . Again, this acknowledgement vanished with the “return to normality”. Stagflation and energy crises are reminders that we ignore the impact of the crisis of neoliberalism on inequalities at our peril, especially as they fuel neonationalist tensions within and between countries. This should lead to reflect on finding another route out of the crisis through a revisited welfare state and to consider how higher education might contribute to it and benefit from it. A new social contract: transformative crises and the case for countercyclical spending Is the post-1945 progressive social contract based on the welfare state a one-off historical product of unmatched human and physical destruction? Can socioeconomic transformations addressing inequalities only be triggered by catastrophic events? The human impact on climate change seems serious enough to require a new social contract still nowhere to be seen. Looking back at Kondratiev cycles offer hopeful examples of earlier crises which, unlike 1973 and 2008, were deeply transformative (Carpentier, 2015) . The crises of 1833, 1873 and 1929 all triggered countercyclical social spending funded by progressive taxation leading to technological and social innovations. Each crisis revived productivity while reducing inequalities and incrementally transformed the socio-economic system and crystallised into the post-war consensus (Fontvieille and Michel, 2002) . A revival of fair taxation today to finance countercyclical spending might be the opportunity to drive a new social contract correcting an unsustainably unequal socioeconomic system characterised by the emergence of technological innovations without social transformations and regulations protecting people, their economy, society, and environment. Higher education should contribute to that change alongside other levels of education (Scott, 2021) and the whole social sphere. Reversing public/private substitution through revived grants to institutions and students is urgent to ensure that higher education shifts its focus from its own unsustainability and instability to tackle inequalities and address the interrelated political, economic, social and environmental challenges ahead (Carpentier and Unterhalter, 2022 ; McCowan, 2025 ). Rebalancing the funding of higher education is about realigning its economic and other rationales (Ashwin et al , 2026) and reviving a public service of higher education anchored to a revisited welfare state able to drive a renewed social contract reconciling economies and societies. Vincent Carpentier is Professor of Higher Education and Society at the UCL Institute of Education. His teaching and research activities are located at the interface of history of education and political economy. His comparative research explores the historical relationship between educational systems, Kondratiev cycles and social change. He is particularly interested in exploring the long-term connections and tensions between funding, expansion and institutional differentiation of higher education systems at both national and global levels.
8 May 2026
Guidance: How to register on the learning records service
Registration documents for learning providers and awarding organisations to gain access to the learning records service (LRS) portal and services.
8 May 2026
Guidance: How to register on the learning records service
Registration documents for learning providers and awarding organisations to gain access to the learning records service (LRS) portal and services.
8 May 2026
Guidance: How to register on the learning records service
Registration documents for learning providers and awarding organisations to gain access to the learning records service (LRS) portal and services.
8 May 2026
Guidance: How to register on the learning records service
Registration documents for learning providers and awarding organisations to gain access to the learning records service (LRS) portal and services.
8 May 2026
Guidance: How to register on the learning records service
Registration documents for learning providers and awarding organisations to gain access to the learning records service (LRS) portal and services.
8 May 2026
Decision: Teacher misconduct panel outcome: Mr Stephen Lord
Professional conduct panel outcome, including decision and reasons.
8 May 2026
Guidance: Consistent financial reporting 2025 to 2026: technical specifications
Data submission specifications for the consistent financial reporting 2025 to 2026.
8 May 2026
Guidance: Consistent financial reporting 2025 to 2026: technical specifications
Data submission specifications for the consistent financial reporting 2025 to 2026.
8 May 2026
Guidance: Consistent financial reporting 2025 to 2026: technical specifications
Data submission specifications for the consistent financial reporting 2025 to 2026.
8 May 2026