While the constantly evolving COVID-19 situation makes it difficult to predict, a number of studies have shown that students are more likely to delay rather than cancel study abroad plans and it is predicted that demand for study abroad will surge as the pandemic subsides. It has also been suggested that there will be a shift in market share post-COVID as a result of countries’ handling of the crisis.

The Covid-19 pandemic has had a huge impact on the Higher Education sector over the last few months. Institutions and networks continue to react swiftly to an ever-changing situation, and as the case with many other sectors, have been developing new ways of working with strained resources.

The usefulness of benchmarking in any instance is the accuracy, validity and consistency of the data collection. This may be achieved via remote collection of data but invariably requires people to be on-site to ensure all assumptive processes are removed and the final dataset is consistent with the framework being employed. Getting this right enables meaningful performance comparison across any number of public providers and on a huge range of characteristics. 

Accurately identifying inefficiencies 

The words and the backdrop may differ, but the sentiment is largely the same across the world’s Post Secondary Education (PSE) systems – find out which parts of the organisation are less efficient and address those inefficiencies.  

Many OECD countries currently face falling domestic enrolments. Universities have been able to successfully prop their numbers up by looking to the international student market for a number of years, but there is increased concern about an unsustainable over-reliance on international students.  

Improving financial performance and mitigating risk in post-secondary restructures

Post-secondary education systems regularly change as a result of new government policy, or the introduction of initiatives to tackle under-performance in student outcomes or financial terms. 

The right levers to move Scottish Colleges forward

There is no silver bullet Scotland’s colleges can use in the efficiency and performance improvement battle, but with careful, informed and accurate pulling of the right levers, the sector can be in good shape to meet the challenging targets being set. 

As cloud spend in UK education is tipped to hit £125m by 2020/21, what are the reasons some leaders might not be quite so quick to jump on the adoption curve?

With cloud spending within UK education predicted to increase to £125m by 2020/21 some might be forgiven for thinking that moving to the cloud is an objective in itself. Fortunately, education leaders are seeing beyond the technological implementation side of things and focusing on the outcomes cloud brings about. And certainly, in UK education, there are 3 key strategic areas leaders are looking to address through cloud – flexibility/scalability, cost effectiveness/reduced capital expenditure, and efficiency/agility, which account for 68% of the drivers for cloud adoption ^[1].