If you were looking for reasons to be optimistic about the future of Higher Education, or HE, in England, the last academic year was a rather disappointing spectacle.

The inflation-linked rise in tuition fees towards the end of 2024 was swallowed up by the simultaneous increase in National Insurance costs for employers, including HE providers, while this summer’s Spending Review across all government departments offered no solutions to the sector’s funding woes.

In contrast, this academic year has started with HE in the news for a more positive reason, with the announcement on September 10th that the University of Greenwich and the University of Kent intended to “formally collaborate” to create a new “super-university”, provisionally titled the London and South East University Group.

So what is this new university group, and what is it trying to achieve? Could other universities be tempted to follow suit by setting up their own group-like structures? And is the notion of university groups the future of HE in this country or merely a distraction?

My guests are David Kernohan, the Deputy Editor of Wonkhe – a higher education news site - and Rachel Hewitt, the Chief Executive at MillionPlus, the Association for Modern Universities.

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When Ofsted, the school and college inspectorate in England, launched a consultation earlier this year on their new framework for conducting inspections, the response from teachers and leaders was pretty damning.

That’s not to say that an inspection system is ever likely to be universally loved, but Ofsted’s original plans – which we discussed on this podcast back in February – created a huge backlash.

So Ofsted went away and had another go, culminating in their new set of proposals for conducting inspections, released on September 9th. Unfortunately for Ofsted, the response from all the major unions has been just as critical at the second time of asking.

So what changes has Ofsted announced to their upcoming inspection framework? Are these changes the ones that critics wanted to see? And which parts of future Ofsted inspections are likely to prove controversial for many months to come?

My guests are Helena Marsh, the principal of Linton Village College, a comprehensive secondary school in South Cambridgeshire, and Mark Enser, a writer and columnist and also a former Ofsted inspector.

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Welcome back to Inside Your Ed – I hope you all had a great summer.

For many people working in politics, the summer break offers a gentler pace of life while most MPs and government ministers are away from Westminster. However, one former MP and minister decided that instead of putting his feet up, he should publish a new book that was almost destined to attract plenty of attention.

At the start of August, former schools minister Sir Nick Gibb and his co-author Robert Peal launched ‘Reforming Lessons: Why English Schools have improved since 2010 and how this was achieved’.

As you would expect from someone who was not afraid to take on his critics as a government minister, Nick Gibb puts forward a range of arguments and evidence to explain the major changes that he oversaw during his time in government.

I’m delighted to be joined today by Sir Nick, whose career includes 27 years as an MP, five years as Shadow Schools Minister and over 10 years as Schools Minister, for which he received a knighthood earlier this year.

So, what drove Nick Gibb’s thinking about how to improve schools in England? Is there anything he would have done differently with the benefit of hindsight? And where does Nick Gibb agree and disagree with the Labour Party - both past and present - when it comes to raising school standards?

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