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This ½¿É«µ¼º½ Blog special issue examines possible futures for tertiary education in England and the challenges that are faced by policymakers, institutional leaders, educators and researchers in realising these futures. While there is consensus that England is moving towards an integrated tertiary education system, there is in practice. What is clear is that this system will be in marked contrast to the disconnected set of quasi-markets incorporating a range of higher, further and continuing education providers that currently constitutes tertiary education in England.

The intention of this ½¿É«µ¼º½ Blog special issue is to open up debates about the development of a tertiary education system in England. Evidence-informed discussions about tertiary education are essential if we are to develop an inclusive and transformative tertiary education system in England. We hope the posts in this issue contribute to the development of such discussions.

The contributions to this issue explore: 

• whether tertiary education will simply become a different way of describing existing provision or help to create an inclusive system of tertiary education
• the difficult issues faced by politicians when moving to an integrated tertiary education system in England
• the political issues faced in building a tertiary education system that needs to balance economic objectives with broader educational and social aims
• how to design a tertiary education that meets the skills challenges of improving skills among adults, the rate of technological change and the growth of digitalisation and generative AI
• the need to radically reconfigure the relationship between sectors and institutions for a tertiary education system to be successful
• how an integrated tertiary system would need to overcome the existing fragmentation between ‘research and innovation’ and ‘education and training’
• a devolved strategy that enables tertiary education to evolve regionally and locally, to better align with the economic needs and aspirations of local communities
• the building of regional tertiary education systems and how individual institutions might help to design and deliver increasingly integrated local tertiary education systems
• how tertiary education needs to provide learners with diverse routes through all levels of tertiary education
• how tertiary education needs to be built around giving people access to knowledge-rich skills, rather than the empty generic skills that appear so frequently in policy documents
• how the tertiary system needs to embrace a much more expansive definition of adult lifelong learning that will support people to navigate all aspects of their lives rather than just their working lives.