"I was never really put off by the fees," says Maya Little. She is part of a surging number of young women beginning university this autumn, while the number of men going into higher education seems to have stalled. When fees increased in England in 2012 to £9,000, demand for places carried on rising for women, but not for men. The latest official figures show 55% of women entering higher education by the age of 30 compared with 43% of men. The proportion of women pursuing degrees has risen ...

Low-earning graduates will benefit from a delay in their student loan repayments under a Conservative scheme designed to defuse the political damage over tuition fees and attempt to woo younger voters. Speaking at the start of the Conservative party conference in Manchester, Theresa May announced plans to raise the income level that triggers student loan repayments for recent graduates in England from £21,000 to £25,000 a year. The change is likely to apply only to those graduates who took out...

UK universities have made progress with widening access to higher education in recent years. But while there are further advances to be made, there is an increasing realisation that focusing on entry to university is not enough. The combination of the opportunity to study and academic achievement doesn’t guarantee a good job. Evidence at Queen Mary University of London suggests that our graduates do not always succeed personally, nor make a societal contribution, to the extent that their talents...

Low-earning graduates will benefit from a delay in their student loan repayments under a Conservative scheme designed to defuse the political damage over tuition fees and attempt to woo younger voters. Speaking at the start of the Conservative party conference in Manchester, Theresa May announced plans to raise the income level that triggers student loan repayments for recent graduates in England from £21,000 to £25,000 a year. The change is likely to apply only to those graduates who took...

European Union states will be encouraged to produce comparable data on graduate employment to ensure that degrees remain relevant to the labour market. While the vast majority of the EU’s involvement in higher education is now focused on either funding research and innovation through the Horizon 2020 programme or mobility through Erasmus+, there are signs that the next multi-year funding framework will seek to tackle other issues. Speaking at the European University Association’s first for...

Tony Blair’s pledge that half of all young people should go on to higher education is within a whisker of becoming true as official figures revealed that 49% of those in England are expected to have entered advanced studies by the age of 30. The government’s measure of higher education participation has reached its highest level since the introduction of £9,000 tuition fees in 2012, equalling the previous record of 49% since the annual estimates were first produced in 2006. The figures sho...

Testing theories through experiments and trials is crucial for pupils to learn science and could improve results for disadvantaged pupils in primary and secondary schools, according to a new report published by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) and the Royal Society today. Researchers from the Department of Education at the University of Oxford reviewed the best international research to identify the interventions and approaches for which there is evidence of a positive impact on young...

The number of pupils taking arts subjects at GCSE has fallen to the lowest level in a decade, as schools encourage bright students to shun “soft” subjects. The uptake of arts subjects has seen a drastic decline in recent years, according to an analysis by the Education Policy Institute (EPI). Their report analyses the uptake of GCSEs in arts subjects - including art and design, drama and theatre, music, dance, and performing arts – over the past ten years. Researchers from the EPI examined...

In the future we will laugh at things we currently take for granted. How we all carry around big slabs of glass as phones and then act surprised when we smash them. Or how we let people get sick, rather than using data analytics to predict illness and get in early. But a special sort of befuddlement will be retained for the future historian looking back at how we run university entry. Each year, hundreds of thousands of young people apply to university using a system built on smoke and mirror...

Tuition fees in England are under intense scrutiny - with a huge amount of confusion about what is going to happen next. They're meant to be increased even further - but there is a feeding frenzy of briefings suggesting that they are more likely to be reduced. It's a case of the politics of a minority government - and competing power bases - becoming more important than policy. No one wants to be left holding an unpopular policy when the music stops - and Downing Street and the Treasury, ...