PODCAST: Quality, demand, blended, disabled students

This week on the podcast the Office for Students’ consultations on quality have closed - what has the sector been saying?

We’ve been kicking off a debate about meeting demand for HE in the next decade and whether student number controls are part of the answer. Plus OfS has launched a review into blended learning, and there’s two new reports on disabled students.

With Nick Hillman, Director of HEPI, Kate Wicklow, Policy Manager at Guild HE, Debbie McVitty, Wonkhe’s editor and presented by Jim Dickinson, Wonkhe’s Associate Editor.

Featured on the show

• What the sector is saying in response to consultation and conversations about quality
• OfS is to review blended learning
• Is it time to think more strategically about how and where the sector grows, how growth could affect the quality of the student experience and where would be good places to put new universities?
• Are disabled students being failed by a system that is supposed to offer support?

Correlate

You might have spotted I've been looking at provider-level growth in full time, undergraduate, UK domiciled, first year students on the site recently. I was wondering if there was any relationship between 4 year growth here and growth in the perennially fascinating number of car parking spaces at a university over the same four years? Does a dash for growth mean a dearth of campus parking? Does it correlate...

... the answer is no. R squared doesn't reach significance, and I can only conclude that parking is not a primary consideration in student recruitment.

Data is from HESA for the four years including 2016-17 and 2019-20. The usual caveats apply to Estates coverage, and where the data doesn't exist I've not plotted it!

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