Dr Peter O’Brien, YU Executive Director Diana Beech, Chief Executive of London Higher This article was first published by Wonkhe on 21 October 2024 Keir Starmer’s new Labour government is committed to delivering five key missions: growth; NHS reform; clean energy; safer streets; and opportunity for all. Underpinning this approach is a shift towards a …
Professor Dave Petley, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hull.
Hannah Wyatt In March, I had the opportunity to represent the University of Hull at an event focused on sustainability and student engagement across Yorkshire – the Student Sustainability Research Conference (SSRC) held at the University of Leeds, where my team and I led an interactive workshop session based on our Eco-Sprint project. The journey …
This op-ed was originally published online by the Yorkshire Post on 27 April 2024. Every year, our region welcomes thousands of international students to universities across Yorkshire. At a time when international student applications are declining as a result of changes to visa policies, it is important that we remind ourselves of how international students are …
New job! I’m now a Y-PERN fellow, officially based in the Management School at Sheffield University, but mostly working with the South Yorkshire Combined Mayoral Authority (SYMCA, pronounced by folk who work there as ‘sim-ka’). Y-PERN (“Yorkshire & Humber Policy Engagement and Research Network”) is a pretty unique project – Research England funded it specifically to strengthen the glue between Yorkshire and Humber’s universities and its local and mayoral authorities, building on a memorandum of understanding between them. The project itself doesn’t have traditional academic research questions or output requirements; the glue-strengthening is the whole point.
Elizabeth Sanderson and Dr Jamie Redman, Y-PERN Policy Fellows (South Yorkshire), at the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research, Sheffield Hallam University Over the last few decades, the UK has seen a rise in low quality work (Goos and Manning, 2007). These are jobs which are broadly defined as low-skilled, low-paid, insecure and more …
Recently, I had the pleasure of attending the first Y-PERN Policy Fellows Development Day, hosted by the University of Bradford. Part of the core strategy of Yorkshire Universities is to work with policymakers nationally and in the region. One of the mechanisms by which we do this is through the Research England-funded Yorkshire and Humber Policy Engagement and Research Network (Y-PERN). Y-PERN’s multi and inter-disciplinary team of eleven Policy Fellows, covering all four sub/city-regions of Yorkshire, is an integrated network of knowledge brokers, connecting local and regional university research and ideas directly into Yorkshire’s policymaking communities.
The recent financial difficulties of several English local authorities has focussed attention on financial and innovations which have been pursued, extensively by some, over the past decade or so. In particular, the role of commercial investments in the financial collapses in Woking Borough Council and Thurrock have been in the spotlight, calling forth calls of ‘I told you so’ from those who cautioned against (what have subsequently been proven to be) risky investments. Councils invested some £6.6 billion in commercial property such as hotels, offices and shopping centres from 2016/17 to 2018/19 alone. However, this is far from the whole picture, as local governments have once again also displayed remarkable innovative capacity in the harshest of circumstances, generating alternative revenue streams, making novel trading and charging interventions in local markets, launching direct ‘for profit’ trading companies in municipal goods and services, creating public service cooperatives and mutuals in collaboration with communities, and exploiting procurement policies as a tool to support local economies.
In November 2022 ChatGPT was launched. ChatGPT is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Chatbot built on OpenAI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer class of language models and it rapidly developed popularity for its detailed answers, its articulate and creative responses, and not in the least as its answers could be easily shared across social media. The AI Chatbot space is particularly competitive with releases such as Google’s Bard offering comparative functionality.
Guest blog by Dr Charlie Ball, Head of Labour Market Intelligence, Jisc Establishing the footprint of the digital industry in the UK is not a straightforward task. Definitions of what ‘digital’ actually entails have changed over the years and continue to evolve as work continues to migrate online. Different stakeholders use the same terms to …
