Today’s Weekly Focus is a recap of some of the events that took place this week.

On Monday, Hepi published a report which looked into student opinion on the 2017 Referendum.  There was also the release of Hefce’s Prevent Strategy Report.  On Tuesday, the BIS committee held the second evidence session of its inquiry into assessing the quality of higher education, where heard from sector representatives including staff and students.  The Association of Colleges president Widdowson spoke in the session on the quality of FE in HE; and Chancellor of Lancaster University and Chair of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission Alan Milburn addressed issues of social mobility and Further Education.  The president of the NUS, general secretary of the UCU and the student reviewer of QAA were also among the speakers.  The event was followed by the publication of the BIS report Further education: impact of skills and training on the unemployed on Dec 3, 2015. The report recognises Further Education’s ‘substantial impact’ in getting the unemployed back to work.

The Hepi Annual Lecture was held on Tuesday, with the Director of Education at the OECD presenting on ‘Value-added? How do you measure whether universities are delivering for their students?’: Hepi will publish the lecture which will be available online.

On Wednesday, quite a lot took place in the HE sector.  Firstly, QS released their Best Student Cities Index.  The Welcome Trust also released a new study looking at researcher engagement with the public, titled Exploring the Barriers of Public Engagement by UK Researchers. It concludes that researchers over the past decade have made significant changes in public engagement.

Event-wise, the UUK and the Equality Challenge Unit organised a one day conference, Equality and Diversity in Higher Education, to discuss relevant issues in the sector.  Coverage can be found on hashtag #UUKED. The Observatory on Borderless Higher Education also held a two day event on the The New Landscape of Higher Education.

On Thursday, the Universities UK has published this year’s Pattern and Trends in UK Higher Education 2015 report.  We will surely see plenty of analysis on this publication in the coming week.