30 June 2026 
Jonathan Rans, HESPA Executive Director
In this article, Jonathan Rans introduces the HESPA Policy Radar, which highlights current policy of interest to planners and enables you to connect with HESPA’s response.
When there’s a lot going on it’s very easy to feel that you might have missed something. That’s certainly true of HESPA, which is a very broad and active community. It’s also true of the policy landscape in UK Higher Education where each week seems to bring new news of proposed changes to legislation, data collection methodologies or government strategic direction. For planners, it can be a challenge to stay on top of announcements and parse the signal from the noise. Even if you manage that, it begs the question ‘what now?’, how do you respond and where are your efforts best directed to understand the implications and make a difference?
It was to address this that HESPA set up the Policy Forum, a committee focused on the impact of medium- and long-horizon policy changes. You can learn more about the composition and mission of the HPF on the HESPA website here:
The HESPA Policy Radar is a way of presenting the current preoccupations of the HPF and to highlight the ways in which you can engage with the activities HESPA are delivering in response.
The Radar is updated quarterly and published on the HESPA Knowledge Hub, linked to from the Policy Forum pages. The first edition is available here:
This presents policy issues, arranged by distance from engagement and colour-coded to show the response we expect HESPA to take. In that way, you’ll know whether this is an issue that we’ll cover in a planned event or are actively developing a consultation response to. Of course, all of this will be highlighted in our biweekly newsletter, but it’s good to be prepared. Not least, it’s reassuring to know which topics are being discussed by colleagues, so you know that you haven’t missed anything.
The Policy Forum is very happy to hear feedback on the radar – if you think there’s something that’s been missed or you want to contribute to our response, get in touch with me.
Jonathan
