It was back to London again this week. I was attending the WonkHE event, The Collaboration Question.

I have spent much of the last two years working in the collaboration space, and though I wasn’t sure about what I would personally learn from the event, I was interested to see what others were doing and thinking in this area.

In the end I really enjoyed the event and got a lot out of it. There is huge potential for collaboration in UK higher education and research. Not that collaboration isn’t already happening.

I still feel though that many of the conversations are striving to solve the “problem” of collaboration. Personally I see collaboration as a solution to other problems. For example financial sustainability of the sector, could collaboration be the solution that enables financial savings to be made. There are examples out there that show this.

I headed to the Bristol office on Wednesday, was nice to work in the building, however traffic around Bristol when I wanted to leave the office was horrendous, so much so I turned around and went back to the office. I do appreciate the flexibility of my employment means I am not commuting every day to the office.

There is ongoing negotiations between the UK and the EU on student fees. With the work I have been doing in the student mobility space, I am watching this with interest.

We saw more press about the challenges in paying back student loans. For years we saw little or no coverage of the issue, but over the last twelve months there has been extensive main stream media coverage of the issues with student loans. This week the BBC reported on how ‘misleading’ student loans information left out examples of higher-salary repayments.

Several universities in England have only been using below-average salaries in examples of student loan repayments on their websites, the BBC has found. Treasury Committee chair Dame Meg Hillier, who led a recent inquiry into student loans, said some information about repayments was “misleading”, including one instance where they were compared to the “cost of a daily coffee”. She also said the Department for Education (DfE) must include higher-salary examples on its own website, too.