The announcement in yesterday’s Budget that the government will set up a new £100 million fund to support investment in major new university research facilities is ‘good news’, according to UK University groups and think tanks. The fund will allocate its first bids in 2012–13 and will attract additional co-investment from the private sector.

Around 74,000 children have missed out on a place at their first-choice secondary school in England, official figures reveal today.

However, the government are keen to stress that is around 5,000 fewer than last year. Schools Minister, Nick Gibb welcomed the improvement but said that too many (around one in seven) would still have to attend a secondary school this September that was not top of their list.

The statistics reveal the breakdown of the secondary school offers made to more than 503,000 children on 1^st March this year; a date which has become known to parents as, ‘National Offer Day’.

 

The number of international students choosing to study in Britain is set to rise faster than overseas student enrolments anywhere else in the world outside of Australia, according to a new study from the British Council.

This growth is set against an expected global slowdown in the number of internationally mobile students, and will be significantly smaller than the increasing intake of overseas students experienced by UK higher education over the past ten years.

Chief Inspector of schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw told the BBC’s Newsnight programme last night that “standards have stalled” in reading and literacy in England’s schools and that “other nations have being doing better than us”.

Sir Michael, who took up the role of chief inspector in January this year, is expected to highlight the latest Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey, in a speech to teachers today, which showed that the UK had slipped from 17th to 25th place in a world-wide comparison of children’s reading standards.

The Times Higher Education (THE) magazine has published its 2012 World Reputation Rankings today. The annual reputation rankings are, according to the magazine, “based on the world’s largest survey of academic opinion” and may help provide an insight into the shifting academic prestige of institutions.

This year’s rankings provide evidence of an elite group of US and UK global “super-brands”, head and shoulders above the rest of the pack. The group is headed by Harvard University in 1st, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2nd), the University of Cambridge (3rd), Stanford University (4th), the University of California, Berkeley (5th) and the University of Oxford (6th).

On March 1, parents across England found out which state secondary school their child will be allocated starting from September 2012, on what has become known as ‘National Offer Day’.

Government figures show that in 2011, 79,000 children did not get the secondary school of their choice and nationally, only 84.6% of 11-year-olds received an offer at their first choice. For relocating families applying outside the usual admissions round, these figures are likely to cause concern as they indicate oversubscription in good state schools.