This week I made it to the Bristol office to work and meet with colleagues. I had a chance meeting with a member of the OpenAthens team which was useful and we sat down and had a discussion about trust and identity. I do like going to the office, and have decided I will try and get in more than I have been going. I think the wet weather probably puts me off. The other aspect is that if I have a lot of online meetings, then actually going into the office is makes that more challenging, as I would need to book a meeting room, and on some days, when the office is busy, there are fewer meeting rooms available.

I wrote an article on Erasmus+ for the internal comms team, which did draw on the article I wrote for this blog back in December.

I did write three blog posts this week. The first was on students’ perceptions of their providers’ response to financial challenges.

What this report and analysis is showing is that student satisfaction is being impacted by the financial situation in higher education.

The second was on the news from the University of Nottingham about their course closures and staff student ratios.

The university is planning to consolidate the number of faculties from five to three and reduce the number of courses that are delivered at the university by suspending recruitment on 42 courses. 

The two stories are somewhat linked. The financial crisis impacting on the higher education sector is not just about numbers and figures, it is about people. As well as the impact on staff and redundancy, we are also seeing the negative impact on the student experience and student satisfaction. Alas, this can be a somewhat downward spiral if we see student numbers drop. Having said that the news from UCAS this week was 338,940 UK 18-year-olds have applied for university – a record high and 4.8 per cent more than the 323,360 that applied in 2025. That increase though is driven by demographics, the number of 18 year olds in 2026 is largest for 35 years. Probably better to look at the application rate as a percentage of that demographic, and then the figure has remained relatively static at 40.7%, it was 40.6% in 2025. There was a peak of 42.8% in 2022. What we can say then is the rise in applications is down to population growth.

Going forward if applications stay around the 40% mark then we will in the future see the number of applications fall. Of course not all of those 40% actually go to university and then there are others who will choose later to go having not made an UCAS application.  The recent government white paper no longer talks of the 50% going to university but does talk about 67% undertaking some form of higher level education. What does that look like going forward?

The third blog post was on generalisations and assumptions.

As I said earlier, as a society technology and digital has become more embedded into our lives, the concept of post-digital echoes the sentiment that as technology becomes part of our everyday lives, the less we see it as technology. At the end of the day we are probably all digital now, living in a post-digital world.

I have been looking at the European Higher Education Interoperability Framework, in the main for the work I have been doing in the E in NREN landscape, but also how it could support LLE in the future. It is also been used within the UCISA work on the student data model.

I have been researching and planning some position papers on the European Higher Education Interoperability Framework, looking at the current UK landscape and what Jisc is doing or could do in that landscape.

I have also been having discussions about collaboration and sharing. One question that sometimes comes up, is do we know how to collaborate?

Though there has been ample talk about collaboration and sharing, it is one of those things that is probably easy to talk about and more difficult to actually do. Part of the challenge is how universities are inconsistent in their approaches to managing themselves, which then makes it even more challenging to work together or collaborate.

We need to remind ourselves that collaboration and sharing within higher education isn’t the problem we need to solve, it is in fact a solution (and not the only solution) to a (probably not well defined) problem. We need to be clear about the problem, define that problem, and then we can start thinking about possible solutions, one of which may be collaboration and sharing.