This paper provides a review of the contextual factors that are associated with levels of morale and job satisfaction in academic institutions. It argues that universities can purposefully create workplace environments that support employee well-being by measuring, attending to, and addressing levels of collegiality; designing policies that…

Post-pandemic, there is a growing recognition that higher education needs to take a more proactive role in addressing the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals -- the 17 goals for 2030 that aim to balance global economic development with the need to tackle climate change and protect our natural ecosystems. This change of focus has profound…

This essay proposes a novel approach to developing shared educational resources for higher education. Building on characteristics of successful moves to open access in scholarly publishing, it scopes a network of discipline-based cross-institutional hubs for finding, sharing and reusing educational outputs. As well as creating repositories of…

The COVID-19 global pandemic has created an unprecedented experience for many. The private higher education was not spared and currently faces numerous challenges. This paper aims to provide a brief background on the higher education landscape in Malaysia and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the private higher education sector. Inevitably,…

This article explores the findings from my professional doctorate that focused on professional services staff in a university in the North West of England and their perceptions of identity. With little literature surrounding the identity of professional services staff, this paper asks if professional services staff relationships with academic…

This article considers the difficulty of implementing change in a university workplace and discusses the popularity of 'the Valley of Despair' change curve as a way of predicting and managing resistance to change. The Valley of Despair is based on Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's (1970; 2005) work with the dying and bereaved, and posits that people going…

This paper reports on the findings of an ESRC funded project that contributes to the evidence base underpinning contextualised approaches to undergraduate admissions in England. We show that the bolder use of reduced entry requirements for disadvantaged learners is necessary if ambitious new widening access targets set by the Office for Students…

The COVID-19 pandemic creates an immediate need to deliver existing pre-entry widening participation outreach work remotely. In doing so this means rethinking existing programmes and adapting existing working practices. This paper proposes a three-dimensional framework involving pedagogical, technological and the humanistic elements. It argues…

This article reviews key themes in articles published in Perspectives over the past 25 years since the journal was launched. It highlights changes in the journal itself and its readership as the higher education landscape has evolved. We review the first few editions in the journal and key topics over the past quarter century. This article…

Higher education in England has expanded in most years since the Second World War, moving from an elite system to a mass one where half of school leavers now progress to university. A lasting funding settlement, however, has proved elusive as the generosity of the post-war decades became unviable as the sector expanded. Eventually this led to the…

The importance placed on student engagement strategies within higher education (HE) and the emphasis on sophisticated and expensive polices by universities has been well documented. In an increasingly competitive marketplace, the main aim of such resource intensive aims is fundamentally to attract students to their institutions. This study…

Reviewing institutional governance arrangements through a European lens has the benefit of broadening the argument away from differences between pre-1992 and post-1992 constitutions or between research-intensive and teaching-led university perspectives. In the last two decades in Europe is a massive increase in student numbers and institutional…

A multitude of forces are driving Canadian universities, as well as many other institutions across the country, to enhance equity, diversity, and inclusion ('EDI'). All organisations instinctively turn to educational initiatives to instil and promote EDI. The value of EDI education, notably training about unconscious bias and how to mitigate its…

Universities rely heavily on co-operation between staff to function effectively. They are complex, interdependent and highly relational organisations which often appear to run on goodwill. Organisational structures, systems and processes play an important role in the delivery of professional support services, but working relationships between…

This article draws on literature related to university leadership and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer plus (LGBTQ+) identities to argue for LGBTQ+ specific leadership programmes in higher education. The article considers how the skills and attributes for university leadership have changed in response to marketisation and widening…