Educational success drives economic growth. As the world economies slog through the impact of the financial crash, few governments have lost sight of the need to invest deeply and for the long-term in a most precious asset - their nation's talent. And the role of higher education in developing innovators...

How we grow our way out of the crisis and develop healthy, vibrant and sustainable prosperity should be the daily preoccupation of every policy maker in the UK, no matter which department they sit in. One answer lies in world class research and development (R&D) and innovation collaboration between businesses...

For over three hundred thousand university students, the rest of their lives start now (albeit with a rather fuzzy head and a series of embarrassing Facebook entries.) Freshers weeks are over, initiation absorbed, and the first lectures and tutorials are under the belt.

Good time, then, for the European...

International students studying in the UK bring an estimated £8bn to our struggling economy. In the coming decade this figure is expected to double. Given that the government is struggling to kick start the economy, you might think it would be keen to support a key area of growth.

But...

To SME or not to SME, that is the question. Well, in the case of the Brighton Fuse, that is the questionnaire. This week the BF team are launching an online survey to figure out why Brighton works as a creative, digital and IT (CDIT) cluster, how the...

A very senior business leader told me recently that he saw languages as the new STEM. The STEM subjects - science, technology, engineering and mathematics - are deemed to be of strategic importance to the economy and are funded more generously by the government. He believed it time to add...

Sir Tim Wilson's review of business-HE relations has hit the desks at the Business Department and very welcome it is, too. Wilson's first recommendation is that the Council for Industry and Higher Education (CIHE) set up an authoritative and evidence-based centre for information about collaboration between private companies,...

With more graduates and fewer vacancies, competition for jobs is fierce. But those leaving university aren't just competing with their peers in this country. Today's university leavers increasingly find that they are applying for the same jobs as graduates from abroad. There is a globally mobile, graduate workforce and leading...

The road to recovery for the economy looks a bit like zig-zag hill in Dorset with lots of twists, turns, unexpected diversions, two-speed recoveries, and slow-moving European juggernauts holding everyone up.

One thing is clear, however, it is going to be a long haul, and successful economies and companies...

At the end of Dickens' Great Expectations poor, abused Estella, tells Pip, whose great expectations were themselves destroyed, that she has been 'bent and broken '. Since the collapse of Lehman's our economy has felt the clammy chill of that sentiment. But Estelle goes on to say: "... but -...

Twenty-first century industrial problems cannot be solved primarily with a nineteenth-century educational toolkit. So whilst it is true that most business people, as well as maths and science specialists, would agree with the Education Secretary Michael Gove's recent assertion that science should be taught as three separate subjects in secondary...

Why is it that girls are doing increasingly brilliantly in GCSE science and A-level physics and yet engineering and manufacturing businesses are stubbornly MIMO at management levels - men in at university, men out into jobs? Around one in ten engineering professionals in the UK are women, the lowest proportion...

You don't have to be a policy wonk to know that policy can go wonky. Nor do you have to be a philosopher to know that good intentions can have bad consequences. The House of Commons Select Committee on Education feels that Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education,...

The modern wealth of a nation flows from its intellectual capital. Obama strongly signalled his understanding of this truth in this year's State of the Nation Address, when he called his continued investment in science 'a Sputnik moment'. Given that the 'travelling- companion -with-the-earth' launched nearly five years before Obama...