This week was a slightly shorter week, as I took a day off and had lunch in Madrid, as one does.

I also went to our Bristol office and had lunch. This week was all about planning and gap analysis. When it comes to planning this was plain old planing, it wasn’t forward planning, nor was it backward planning. I think I might plan a blog post on planning.

Read an interesting article (paywall) about the falling demand for purpose-built city centre student accommodation. 

There was a perception that building this kind of accommodation (or converting existing buildings) would breath life back into city centres.

Another consideration of this fall in demand, is that maybe this is a symptom of how many students view higher education, many will now either look for alternative paths, or will live at home and study locally.

The impact of this will be on those destination universities, such as Nottingham, Bristol, Leeds, etc…

Are we starting to see the beginning of the end of “going away” to university?

I had quite a variety of online calls this week, on a range of subjects. so was involved in lots of different kinds of discussions and conversations.

Next week is Jisc’s Digifest, which takes place in Birmingham. I am not attending this year, in the main as I am not presenting on stuff. There is something to be said about networking and meeting people from the sector, but there will be plenty of people from Jisc there to do that..