Edward Peck is taking up his role of chair of the regulator for England’s higher education sector at a time when the Office for Students’s role continues to evolve. Tasked with managing the sector’s financial sustainability, developing a new approach to quality, and building trust with providers while being prepared to crack down where necessary to sustain public confidence in the sector, the regulator must face in multiple directions at once, all while regulating under a market-based framework that may not support the objectives of the current government in every respect. We’ll be discussing the regulator’s key priorities and strategy, and how to find the tricky balance between support and challenge.

As it turns out the big worry is less about whether generative AI is coming for knowledge workers’ jobs and more what kind of currency the idea of knowledge, truth and fact can have in an AI-saturated world.

Discussion sessions will take the form of a brief initial provocation followed by open debate and sharing of views from those attending.

“Marketisation” gets blamed for a lot of HE’s ills – but the prospect of market management in the forms of measures like student number controls isn’t especially palatable either. This session will discuss where the appetite is to restrict institutional freedoms in the service of the system as a whole – and what the implications might be for regulation.

Discussion sessions will take the form of a brief initial provocation followed by open debate and sharing of views from those attending.

Wonkhe news editor Michael Salmon offers a tour of the biggest stories in HE and explores why they land and what they mean outside of media-land.

The aim of this session is to introduce the idea of a common data model for higher education providers, highlight the benefits of such an approach for the processes and functions that providers carry out, and offer an insight into the work that UCISA and others are currently undertaking in this area.

The Venn – a forum for university leaders who face outward – works on a simple premise: higher education reputation is founded in deeds, not just words. Too often UK higher education finds itself on the back foot in the public conversation, treated as a political football, and expected to have an answer to various complicated social ills. So how do we respond?

Coming together in defence and celebration of higher education, this session, chaired by The Venn co-founder Alex Favier, will explore some of the critical reputational challenges facing higher education institutions and work through ideas for how to tackle them working across and between different professional disciplines.

This session is about solving problems using the resources you already have, but used more effectively.

Solving problems in higher education institutions is really hard. Universities are these big unwieldy public bureaucracies that are full of people doing their best in structures that don’t always serve them, students, or staff.

And it’s not for lack of knowledge. Universities are full of some of the most committed, talented, and hard-working people that you could ever hope to meet. The problem is that leaders are stretched to capacity, few people have a 360 degree view of their organisations, and fixing one thing can often surface another problem.

In this collaborative session facilitated by the Policy.Partners team we will look at the big questions in your institutions and set out shared approaches to finding out the answers. This is a collaborative session about framing, path dependencies, strategies, culture, and it will leave you with approaches that will help you back at work.

Green jobs, green skills, green training: looking beyond the stock photography, we discuss what skills we actually need for a sustainable future and whether the sector is set up to deliver them.

Higher education institutions and staff are experiencing great change with a need for transformation in the context of financial pressures, changing student demands, international uncertainty and digital developments. Alistair Jarvis will lead a discussion with a panel of expert with deep experience and success in transforming institutions and leading people through major change. What can we learn from past experiences? How can we best support leaders to manage change effectively? What can we learn from other sectors? Ultimately, what works?

Questions around demand for higher education continue to occupy the minds of university leaders – especially as cost-of-living pressures increasingly shape student decision making.

But what does the data really tell us about demand for higher education? What are students themselves telling us? And how does this vary across the sector?

Join Maggie Smart, UCAS’ newly appointed Director of Data and Analysis and Ben Jordan, Director of Strategy and Policy for a thought-provoking briefing. They’ll unveil the latest applicant trends, share exclusive survey insights, and explore what these shifts mean for the future of student demand.