Jon Reades

Chart showing lifetime average GDP growth for Brits by year of birth. 20-year-old Brits have experienced an average of 1.4% growth, compared with 2.4% for 75-year-olds

Part of the issue is a lack of growth. A recent study showed that cohorts who experience more GDP growth in their lifetimes are more likely to trust the government and have positive perceptions of their living standards. academic.oup.com/qje/advance-... In Britain, such voters are dying out

British Academy response to the Department for Education's technical consultation on the Interational Student Levy 18 February 2026 Background The Department for Education is consulting on the proposed levy on international student income, due to be introduced in England in August 2028.

‘We remain deeply concerned that universities will be unable to absorb the cost of the levy’s
introduction. The loss of cross-subsidy for domestic teaching & research will harm
universities’ ability to deliver their core functions’
Our response to the levy
www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/60...

Only since having children have I come to understand the analgesic properties of plasters (‘band aids’ if you’re North American).

UK’s biggest student housing provider hit by fall in international enrolment Unite Group cuts rents at some universities and raises cash by selling London site to joint venture for £186m

Well this is very interesting in all manner of ways. Unite have essentially become an asset speculator - build halls; earn rent; sell on before reinvestment is needed.

Also, related, some towns are going to have empty student accomodation blocks soon

www.theguardian.com/education/20...

Would like to be able to say ‘that makes sense’ but no, it really doesn’t. Even more curious about what the outside looks like now.

Why would you want to live on a parking lot? I guess it makes it easy for the guests to get to their cars, but might be hard to drive while bleeding from the eyes.

My Instagram feed is like a series of outtakes from Force Majeure. #Alps #avalanches

We have had some amazing Masters students in previous years on this and the commonwealth scholarship! Come join us!

Interdisciplinarity of places like @kingscollegelondon.bsky.social Geography so valuable. Chats at lunch changed my research directions and transformed my teaching — some of that is still in use there (www.kcl.ac.uk/geography/un...) but is *still* informing my teaching @casaucl.bsky.social

'Indeed, the disintegration of geography at the University of Leicester is premised on the pretence that it is possible to keep elements of physical geography and deliver undergraduate geography degrees without any human geographers. This fundamentally misunderstands what geography is'. 2/2

The UK universities cutting geography have lost their bearings From climate change to geopolitics, the knowledge, skills and insights of geographers have never been more relevant, say five professors

Geography's 'combination of STEM, social science and arts and humanities can sit uneasily within university faculty systems, heightening the risk that we are dismantled into separate components.' 1/2

Congratulations to CASA Research Fellow, Clara Peiret-García, on receiving a @sdruk.bsky.social Fellowship!

Her project will combine smart mobility data with surveys to understand diverse travel patterns, using HASP and GeoDS to support fair post‑pandemic transport planning.

https://bit.ly/4co5e4m

DfE attempts to explain the LLE to applicants. Badly The Westminster government has published some "student facing" material on loan funding under the new Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE) system.

'The credit-based funding model means every student’s entitlement is now a bespoke calculation depending on how many credits they’re studying, what kind of provider they’re at, what TEF rating it has, what type of OfS registration it holds, where in the UK they’re studying....' 1/2

Belfast 2026 Conference Information 52nd ANNUAL CONFERENCE Belfast, Northern Ireland ​ 13 and 14 May, 2026

At each annual conference we have an early career plenary lecture and in Belfast this May that lecture will be given by Dr Ruth Neville @ruthneville20.bsky.social a research fellow in computational social science at @casaucl.bsky.social. Abstract submission deadline is Friday tinyurl.com/9szbc49y

A new paper on student housing, thinking through impacts of regulation on how much space students have to live in! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

An illustration of the benefits university campuses can have in local economies, but the risks of the model too, as I discussed in my blog last year: www.centreforcities.org/blog/branchi...

CASA Profs Max Nathan and Neave O'Clery, PhD student Bohao Su and Research Fellow Laura Mazzarino were at the recent Geography of Innovation conference in Budapest.

The team presented work on migration, global supply chains, innovation networks and models for industrial diversification.

💯 agree linking ‘application layer’ was largely MIA between 80s and Johnson gov’t. Would seem to call for systems for leveraging *additional* gov’t+private sector £££ in key areas, not cutting deeper in areas that are world-leading but not ‘prestigious’ (from digital humanities to sports medicine).

I support industrial policy, but this seems to justify cutting funding to other areas (eg. SHAPE/soc sci) on the basis of a conflation between innovation and commercialisation.

Sorry, but I disagree with this. The industries of the future aren’t here because we don’t have a system to scale them so they were all sold off to American VCs. We also don’t have an approach that rewards risk on the same scale, so if you want to be ‘big’ you move. 1/2

‘Ideally’ doing a lot of heavy lifting. It’s either “I need it by midnight or I don’t get the job” (in which case I’d expect some pretty abject pleading and stonkingly-big excuses) or “I should get this in by end of week so please don’t forget about it and I know that I should have asked sooner”.

I too can no longer recall the time(s) I received £75k from overseas.

Physics is under the cosh, Astronomy and Chemistry in peril, Geography is losing territory, English, Modern Languages and History are among the many shrinking UK disciplines.

Surely it's time to have a concerted, structured conversation about universities and the national research base.

Heh, for a much funnier write up than I’d ever manage, here’s someone who took the hit so that you don’t have to: bsky.app/profile/kole... TL;DR: about what you’d expect given it’s been rushed out and involves the usual batch of consultancies.

As in, am discussing a business opportunity around how LLMs can help end-users search for something complex more naturally, but this didn’t come out of an AI skills class, it came out of related research and ppl with deep knowledge of several domains.

Think I need more ☕️ — struggling to articulate

I can see why if your business needs customer support then this is transformative (even if you end up annoying a % customers with bs answers). But what exactly are you training the rest of the population for in this model? Maybe I missed a key point as only caught the tail end of piece on radio.

In Weak Job Market, Middle Managers Increasingly Forced to Feign AI Success Amid all the hype, companies need human-centered AI that helps workers. Policymakers must protect labor at every level, writes Diana Enriquez.

Read alongside this: www.techpolicy.press/in-weak-job-... I can’t help thinking that this is an AI training solution in search of a problem. There is some really interesting stuff going on with, eg, agentic AI. I find LLMs useful for finding right track when I’m doing obscure work in LaTeX/pandoc.

AI Skills for Life and Work: summary report

The report notes that: “Business leaders face challenges identifying viable AI use cases…” but then plows on with therefore ‘we need AI skills’ and ‘women are less confident than men in judging AI output so they must be under-trained’. www.gov.uk/government/p...

Funding cuts undermining creative sector growth, say art schools Exclusions from government funding pots exacerbating a challenging financial climate for creative institutions, which say talent pipeline for Labour’s priority sector at risk of being jeopardised

Specialist higher education institutions have accused the government of undermining its own mission to grow the UK’s creative industries by cutting funding for arts courses and excluding non-STEM students from grants www.timeshighereducation.com/news/funding... via @helenpacker.bsky.social

CASA's Ruth Neville has been announced as one of ten 2026 UCL Policy Fellows, co‑delivering projects for local needs. Ruth is among six Local Authority Policy Fellows, supporting policy development at Newham Council through population trend analysis.

Find out more: https://tinyurl.com/cj7aenwa