Wonkhe

It's not often that the UK security services get involved in university regulation, but today saw MI5 release an "espionage alert" highlighting the direct link between the China General Technology Research Institution (CGTRI, which sometimes goes by an alias: China Academy of General Technology) and the activities of the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS).

One year on from the publication of the government’s post-16 education and skills white paper, and policy interventions to support the government’s regional higher education agenda have not significantly advanced. However, the sector’s interest and engagement in regional collaboration has intensified and there remains an appetite to explore the structures that can support collaboration and work out a way through the legal position around competition law.

Universities have spent years adapting to a more digital way of working and learning. Online platforms, virtual learning environments, and mobile technologies have transformed how we teach, research, and communicate. The next challenge is not simply how to use technology, but to support staff and students to use digital technology in a healthy way that does not compete for their time, attention or social connection.

Despite the theme of the Labour Party Conference, I don't feel like anyone was holding out reasonable hope (again) for anything substantial for higher education.

Collect the reports, polling, and pamphlets launched around a conference fringe and you end up with a fairly good picture of how the policy world thinks about any given group of people. What a region with growth ambitions needs from students isn’t very complicated. It needs to get them there, keep enough of them once they’ve graduated, and remember in between that they live there – renting, commuting, working shifts, registering with GPs, and voting like everyone else.

There’s been plenty about universities, growth, skills, and place. Most city regions with a growth plan want more graduates, although there’s less understanding of who’s coming and why they might be going. Fewer still have worked out what that means for the years in between – that the people being recruited and retained also live there, and might reasonably expect a say in how the place is run.

The atmosphere around the Labour Party Conference is a pretty good barometer of where the government is at. Last year felt pretty funereal. The one before that felt almost optimistic. The one before Labour was in government, before they actually had to do things, was as party-like as a gathering of thousands of political enthusiasts can be. This year has been less celebratory than the high of a few years ago.

I became a technician because I wanted to. During my undergraduate projects, I realised quite early what technicians brought to research. It was not simply the ability to operate equipment or keep laboratories running, it was judgement. It was knowing what would work, what would not, and often why something had failed before anyone else had worked it out. I often say that I grew up in materials laboratories, because that is where I learned my profession.

Every single education fringe event is about NEETs or apprenticeships, or NEETs and apprenticeships, or NEETs but with a lengthy comment-not-a-question about apprenticeships. It’s actually worse than he says. I’ve done my usual thing of roaming around things that aren’t about education, universities or students but probably should be. And they’ve all been about NEETs as well.

You know the sort of thing. A bunch of items are in a pile to deal with, and you have to sort them on the basis of urgency and importance. And then you realise that regardless of how urgent or important things are, if you’re broke you can’t fix half of them anyway. Enter stage left our new Secretary of State for Education, Lucy Powell.