Although complaints from universities about a perceived lack of funding continue to attract plenty of media attention, some very interesting shifts in policy thinking that are potentially more significant than simple questions about money are already underway.

Several countries such as Australia, Wales, Scotland and Ireland have begun to talk less about universities and colleges in isolation and instead talk more about ‘tertiary education’, with the aim of bringing universities and colleges closer together in terms of how they are funded, regulated and managed.

So why have these nations started thinking about tertiary education as a whole? What benefits could a more integrated tertiary system offer than cannot be achieved when Higher Education and Further Education, or HE and FE, are dealt with separately? And could England follow suit by building a single tertiary system in the coming years, or would it face too many obstacles along the way?

My guests are Professor Ellen Hazelkorn, Professor Emeritus at Technological University Dublin and Joint Editor of Policy Reviews in Higher Education, and Professor Ewart Keep, an emeritus professor in Education, Training and Skills at the Department of Education at Oxford University.

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