Juliette Rowsell
Juliette Rowsell reports on how financial, political and technological pressures are reshaping work and welfare across higher education.
She covers employment issues, teaching and technology for Times Higher Education, with a particular focus on workforce reform, industrial relations and the student experience.
Workforce reform, pay and pensions
Rowsell’s core patch is the changing employment landscape in universities, from restructuring and job cuts to the mechanics of sector pension schemes. She covers stories where institutions seek cost savings through redundancies, reorganisations and new hiring models, such as the job cuts at Dundee that drew condemnation from the Scottish education minister.
Her reporting follows how universities use subsidiary companies to employ staff on different terms, and what those moves mean for the creation of two-tier workforces.
She also tracks the detailed workings of schemes such as the Teachers’ Pension Scheme and the Universities Superannuation Scheme, writing on contribution rate changes, surpluses and projected savings for institutions. Her coverage links those technical shifts to concrete decisions on restructures, strikes and contract changes, showing how pension policy feeds directly into employment practice. Trade union responses are consistently part of the frame, with pieces on strike ballots, marking boycotts and union campaigns around “fire and rehire” disputes. Across these stories she foregrounds the balance between institutional solvency, staff security and the quality of teaching that universities can sustain.
Campus crises and student wellbeing
Rowsell reports extensively on acute campus incidents and their impact on students and staff. Her work on the meningitis outbreak associated with Kent and Canterbury Christ Church covers the progression from initial deaths to cancelled in-person exams, vaccine roll-outs and union calls for guarantees that staff could work from home without disciplinary consequences. She examines how university managements communicate risk, adjust assessment and attendance policies, and respond to pressure from staff representatives when health emergencies unfold.
Student mental health and wellbeing is another strand, reflected in policy coverage and case-led reporting. She writes on how universities address anxiety, resilience and support structures, including accounts from international hubs such as Qatar’s Education City during periods of airstrikes, evacuation orders and disrupted teaching. Her reporting on Palestinian students and disciplinary practices in Israel shows how security measures, protest, and institutional rules intersect with access to education and campus life. In these pieces, she pays close attention to how institutional decisions translate into day‑to‑day experiences for students under strain.
Teaching, technology and regulation
Beyond workforce and welfare, Rowsell covers how teaching and assessment are being reshaped by technology and regulation. Her reporting on AI marking trials in UK institutions explores software that generates grades and feedback, and the implications for academic roles, quality assurance and student trust. She connects experimentation with automation to wider sector debates about whether technological tools are reinforcing or eroding the importance of educators.
Rowsell’s coverage of deals with technology firms, including contested partnerships around generative AI, focuses on concerns about academic freedom, military links and the risk of replacing knowledge work. She writes on regulators and sector bodies such as the Teaching Excellence Framework and Advance HE, examining how frameworks and leadership changes influence institutional behaviour. Her pieces on free speech guidance and political neutrality, including interventions from senior regulatory figures, probe how university statements, governance decisions and compliance duties shape the boundaries of debate on campus.
Diversity, equality and global sector debates
Diversity and equality within higher education is another recurring theme in Rowsell’s work. She reports on studies showing how motherhood affects women’s chances of securing tenured positions, and how antisemitism is described as normalised on UK campuses. Her policy coverage on staff and student diversity by sex and gender explores representation, inclusion and the gaps between institutional commitments and lived realities.
Her reporting from international events and summits adds a global dimension to these questions. At African higher education gatherings she covers calls for universities to become “more African”, concerns over disappearing funding streams, and debates on equity, diversity and inclusion that warn against creating new imbalances. She also writes on interdisciplinary campuses challenging established sector structures, showing how different models of teaching and research contest a status quo shaped by long‑standing hierarchies and financial pressures.
Across this global work, she links funding, governance and cultural context to the ability of institutions to deliver fair, effective education.
Taken together, Rowsell’s coverage is distinguished by its close tracking of how structural decisions in higher education - on employment, pensions, technology, regulation and equity - play out in the working lives of staff and the wellbeing of students.
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