This is the centre’s eleventh annual conference, hosted by Oxford’s Department of Education. Building on the success of 2025, this will be fully hybrid, with 30 parallel panels and roundtables across five different streams: ‘Why it’s hard to make the finances add up’, ‘Mobilities and inequalities’, ‘Freedoms and geopolitics’, ‘Governance and leadership in a populist world’ and ‘Equity, sustainability and reparative futures’. CGHE 2026 will celebrate the life and contributions of Professor Claire Callender, whose academic and policy interests helped prepare the ground for CGHE. Her groundbreaking work on student attitudes towards debt and its long-term consequences, along with her policy advocacy, are being taken forward by colleagues across CGHE’s international community. A key focus for the conference is equity and sustainability. Across the world, governments are wrestling with how to fund the escalating costs of higher education. The global shift to knowledge-based economies, a focus on life-long learning, and the aspiration for universal tertiary education all put traditional models under strain. These new financial models have to balance a range of societal expectations: affordability, equitable access, high quality provision, flexibility and long-term sustainability.

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