Is REF stressing you out? Don’t know your frameworks from your funding settlements? Nervous about what’s on the Horizon? Well don’t worry team Wonkhe is here to help. Join James Coe for an introduction to research policy with lots and lots of time for everything you have always wanted to ask (as long as James knows the answer)

If it’s your first time at the festival, you’re new to higher education, or just attending alone and want to meet some other delegates – grab a coffee and come along and meet the team, and find out how to make the most of your experience.

A chance to hear from higher education legend David Sweeney about his career in HE policymaking and leadership.

Libraries are at the heart of higher education institutions – vital to research and teaching, with a track record of supporting student experience and skills, and key spaces for cultural and community engagement. What could libraries become if we look forward a decade together, and think radically and creatively? This workshop will feature three short provocations to get us thinking, and then convene conversations about the brightest possible future for libraries in HE, and what we need to do now to get there.

Newly minted author and longstanding higher education professional Rachel Reeds joins us to share insight from her forthcoming book, Surviving and thriving in higher education professional services: a guide to success. Whether you are new to HE or are wondering how to reignite your motivation this session should give you some practical tools, new ideas, and reassurance that you are not alone.

Higher education institutions have big plans to change education – to prepare students for their future careers, for a more inclusive pedagogy and curriculum, for learning that engages and inspires students to express themselves. Wonkhe and Adobe’s work on skills, curriculum and assessment, and education change explores the way that using digital tools in learning and assessment can spark fresh thinking and novel approaches. This session will invite you to imagine and design a learning experience that uses multimodal assessment to deliver on vital student outcomes in authentic and meaningful ways.

#notallproviders, right? But concerns over problematic practices in franchised provision of higher education have been expressed this year from the National Audit Office, the Commons Public Accounts Committee, and as a result, the Office for Students. These point to a system that is vulnerable to exploitation by bad actors at the extremes, and even in the ostensibly legitimate end, realising generous profits from exactly the same unit of resource that universities argue no longer comes close to meeting the real costs of teaching. We’ll break down exactly what is going on, and what can be done about it.

Every policy agenda for higher education seems to demand a “whole-institution approach” to solving it, but what does that actually look like? Liz Thomas has been researching a whole institution approach to access and participation and will explore what lessons can be learned for other hitherto siloed and orphaned institutional agendas.