The way British universities communicate with potential students has changed. It used to be graduate employment rates, research prestige, and rankings. These days, the University of East London offers free laptops, gym memberships, and a £1,000 package that can be used for weekly shopping and travel. The way it is framed has shifted. It’s important to pay attention to that. Here, the background is important. For the second year in a row, the number of students fell, primarily due to a 10% decline in international enrollments as a result of stricter visa regulations. In the meantime, according to the Office…
Author: Kelsey Myers
Kelsey Myers
Kelsey Myers is a Senior Editor at worldomep.org and a dedicated advocate for early childhood education whose work begins — and ends — with a simple belief: that the earliest years of a child's life matter more than almost anything else we can invest in. Based at a local school, Kelsey works daily alongside the children and families whose experiences inform everything she writes. She doesn't observe early education from a distance. She is inside it — in the classrooms, on the playgrounds, in the conversations between teachers and parents that shape how young children understand the world around them. That proximity gives her writing a warmth and specificity that purely policy-driven commentary rarely achieves. Through her writing at worldomep.org, Kelsey brings that same energy to readers — making the case, clearly and consistently, that early childhood education deserves far more attention than it typically receives. Kelsey shares her personal opinions on: https://x.com/Butterflyboule
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It began as a standard call. At the University of Surrey’s Manor Park Student Village in Guildford, two campus security officers were asked to move someone out of a common room shortly after eight in the morning on a Thursday. This type of work is common at universities worldwide; it is unremarkable, low-stakes, and nearly administrative. Then a crossbow was used to shoot 51-year-old campus safety officer Robert Tytler. Guildford, a university town that rarely finds itself at the center of a national news story involving medieval weapons and an attempted murder charge, experienced hours of uncertainty as a result.On…
The address that most people eventually discover is 8000 Utopia Parkway, a Queens ZIP code that doesn’t immediately point to one of the East Coast’s bigger private universities. However, St. John’s University, which was established in Brooklyn in 1870 by Vincentian priests, has quietly amassed campuses for the past 150 years, and it takes some time to fully comprehend its current state. The main campus, which occupies about 102 acres, is located in Queens’ residential neighborhood of Hillcrest. It reads like a traditional residential campus with stone buildings, residence halls, a library with over a million volumes, and athletic facilities…
The recent announcement of Deakin University’s restructuring has a detail that keeps coming up. In 2025, the university reported an operating surplus of A$56 million. Revenue increased by 10%. The earnings of international students increased by 15%. However, between those figures and the current situation, 130 to 150 staff positions are being eliminated, and over 620 workers have been informed that their positions are no longer available and that they must reapply for a smaller pool of positions. The official justification points to a “challenging operating environment.” It is more difficult to take that framing at face value because the…
It would have been reasonable to wonder how long the experiment would last when St. Columba College opened in 1997 with 207 students and a truly unique founding concept—a coeducational school jointly established by Anglican and Catholic Archbishops. After almost thirty years, the school now has about 1,450 students, a $20 million secondary building at Andrews Farm in South Australia, and two Archbishops have unveiled a commemorative plaque. It is difficult to overlook the symmetry. The new structure is large. There are twelve classrooms, outdoor learning spaces, a Wellbeing Hub, a dedicated Diverse Learning Center, and—most importantly—a specially designed dark…
You might completely miss it if you stroll down Oxford’s Merton Street on a calm morning. Unlike some of its larger neighbors, Corpus Christi College does not make a big deal out of its location between Merton and Christ Church. By Oxford standards, the entrance is modest, with a tower over the main gate and a honeyed stone facade that gives the impression that the building has existed for a longer period of time than your current concerns. It has. The college was established in 1517, making it older than Shakespeare, the Protestant Reformation, and the notion of England as…
Forty-six-year-old Benjamin Pinckney is a former Army combat medic, a recent graduate of Lehman College in the Bronx, and a man whose life was once saved in an emergency room by a medical assistant. His goal is to work as a PA. He’s not sure he can afford to under a new federal rule that will go into effect on July 1, 2026. He said to ABC News, “If nothing changes, then my dream of being a PA is probably shot.” That is the kind of narrative that transforms a regulatory dispute into something that people genuinely care about. Early…
A small British early childhood education organization sending emergency funds to the Philippines following a devastating typhoon seems almost ridiculous. The World Organization for Early Childhood Education’s United Kingdom committee, OMEP UK, is primarily funded by membership dues and small grants. There are no famous people who represent it. No fancy dinners for fundraising. Nevertheless, OMEP UK managed to organize assistance for young children and their families caught in the debris when Typhoon Haiyan devastated the Visayas in November 2013, affecting over 11 million people and destroying entire coastal towns. The scale mismatch is worth pausing over. $500 million in…
Most small nonprofit chapters just cannot afford the time, money, and institutional stubbornness required to send a delegation halfway across the globe. Since 2008, OMEP Aotearoa, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education’s New Zealand branch, has been able to accomplish this every year by sending educators, researchers, and occasionally postgraduate students to the city hosting the annual OMEP World Assembly and Conference. This streak seems insignificant until you take the logistics into account: New Zealand is about as far away from Europe as any inhabited nation can be, and although its early childhood education system is well-regarded abroad, travel…
Several hundred early childhood educators arrived at the Instituto del Profesorado Sagrado Corazón in Buenos Aires for two days in early May. They brought conference programs, tote bags, and, in many cases, anecdotes about classrooms that are gradually losing ground. The event was the 19th National Gathering of OMEP Argentina, commemorating the organization’s 60th anniversary. Art, bodies, play, and the right to cultural expression in early childhood education were the official themes. The question of whether Argentina’s youngest children will continue to have access to public early education programs, which have taken decades to develop, was, by most accounts, the…