A one day conference was held at the Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol on 4th June 2010 entitled, ‘Higher Education Reform in East Asia and the UK: management and leadership in changing contexts’. The aim of this event was to bring together scholars of higher education management and leadership and to provide a comparison of contexts in the UK and East Asia. From the Research Institute for Higher Education (RiHE), Hiroshima University, we had Professor Shinichi Yamamoto who argued that in light of radical university reform such as national university corporation, national university accreditation and competitive modes of funding, university presidents have been forced to passively accept the new framework rather than take more proactive initiatives. Dr Terri Kim from Brunel University also argued that in South Korea, government has tended to act as a direct regulator of higher education and this has little changed despite numerous reforms and furthermore she concludes that the directions of higher education reforms in South Korea are at a crossroads of “ethnocentric internationalisation and global commercialisation of higher education”. Paul Morrissey completed the trio of presentations on East Asia with a focus on the role of reputation management in higher education governance in the greater China and the UK and the impact of international league tables.