Associate professor Søren Bengtsen, CHEF Vice Leader, and associate professor Rikke Toft Nørgård, core member and part of CHEF's steering group, visited the Institute of Education at the University College London (UCL) and the Department of Education at the Oxford Learning Institute, University of Oxford, as a part of CHEF's ongoing pursuits of building networks and strong ties with researchers within higher education.

Besides the two research institutes at UCL and the University of Oxford, Søren and Rikke also held a meeting with emeritus professor Ronald Barnett (UCL), professor Paul Gibbs (Middlesex University), and reader Amanda Fulford (Leeds Trinity University) from the network for philosophy of higher education.

Rikke and Søren also visited the UCL research centres Centre for Higher Education Studies, Centre for Advancing Learning and Teaching and the Centre for Global Higher Education as well as the Digital Arts Research Education and the UCL Knowledge Lab. The purpose of the visit was to establish lasting, formalised agreements on research collaboration between CHEF and the UK research institutes and centres.

University of Oxford and the Institute of Education at UCL are both world leading institutions. The Institute of Education has been ranked no. 1 in the world among research institutions into higher education several years in a row.

The visited research centres are especially preoccupied with the relation between higher education policy and practice, and several of the leading scholars on these issues are to be found here. Especially important to CHEF is the recently established Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE) - here Søren and Rikke were hosted by director Simon Marginson.

CHEF was warmly welcomed in Oxford and especially at the UCL units in London. Many overlaps in research interests were identified, and agreements to strengthen and formalise the research collaboration were made. CHEF has been invited to give a seminar in the exclusive key debates series of research seminars hosted by the Centre for Global Higher Education, either in the autumn 2017 or the spring 2018. CHEF has furthermore been invited back to the Centre for Global Higher Education in June to participate in a joint application for research funding. At this meeting in June, CHEF will be represented by centre leader, professor Susan Wright and vice leader Søren Bengtsen.

The future plans as an outcome of the visits include formalisation of research collaboration, participation in joint research seminar, meetings at the CHEF/CUDiM-conference The purpose of the future university in Aarhus in November 2017, CHEF contributions to the working paper series at the Centre for Global Higher Education, joint application for research funding, exchange of PhD student from the Arena Centre (formerly known as Centre for Advancing Learning and Teaching (CALT)), and to engage more closely in research collaborations more generally.