Dear colleague,
As you will have seen we have updated our next meetings for the end of the 2015/16 year. We’ve got some really interesting topics for discussion, starting with social mobility and BME students next Tuesday. There are so many different programmes and pieces of work going on in this area all around the sector but the Social Mobility Advisory Group is the first time that all the different players including schools, colleges, academics and practitioners are round one table sharing information about the challenges and ideas of how the sector can meet them. I know this is an area that my parliamentary colleagues are interested in understanding further how they can also help to affect change.
Turning to the TEF, I understand that officials in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills are hard at work looking through the responses to the Green Paper consultation and hopefully we will see a response from government soon. But in the meantime HEPI have put out their thoughts on how a teaching excellence framework should be designed and we should soon be seeing the report by the BIS Select Committee into quality in the sector, so lots of food for thought to keep the sector and parliamentarian busy until the Government responds.
Finally, I just wanted to flag some follow up from the group’s last meeting on International Comparisons of Funding. Andreas Schleicher from the OECD has written an excellent blog on the subject and I would encourage those who have not yet had an opportunity to do so to give it a read.
Roberta Blackman-Woods MP
Chair, University APPG