We’ve been pending, since July 2023, practical details of the defunding of classroom based foundation years.

The Department for Education announced that maximum fees chargeable for “classroom based” foundation years would drop from the standard cap of £9,250 to £5,670 as a result of the HE Reform consultation – so this has been an idea in play since February 2022. Today’s publication constitutes the technical details of how the courses in question would be identified.

In order to do this, DfE needed to define a foundation year. In common with a lot that is widely understood in higher education, there has never been an official definition or description of such provision. This might sound like a dull semantic point, but a poorly drawn definition would also include the provision of things like the Access to HE Diploma, or the Certificate of Higher Education (CertHE), or the other kinds kind of sub-degree provision the government is currently keen to support.

For DfE, a foundation degree meets a number of criteria:

• It is a year, or equivalent, (120 credits) of full-time study,
• It is integrated into the start of an undergraduate course – a student would enrol for a course leading to the final qualification (usually an undergraduate degree) rather than for the foundation year alone.
• Students proceed directly from the foundation year to an undergraduate course – there’s no need to apply to the undergraduate course after completing the foundation year.
• It is not a standalone course, and does not lead to a standard qualification
• It is designed to offer a student the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in a given undergraduate course
• It may be taken at a partner institution via a franchise arrangement, but is not generally taken at one provider to access a course at a different institution entirely
• It is “level-less” – it encompasses material that may be otherwise taught at level 3 and level 4, but the course does not explicitly have a level

The lower fee limit applies to courses that meet the above criteria that cover subjects (or primarily cover a subject) in price group D of the OfS funding model. Despite the language in the briefing, this is not just “classroom based” provision – unless you would imagine a course on rural estate management, child care, education, or social work would be primarily taught in a classroom (to be clear – an education course might be primarily taught in a school classroom, but that is not what is meant here).

Providers submit HECoS codes for subjects all over the place – we are told that this distinction is based on what they tell the Student Loans Company. The official guidance on this is worth quoting:

The subject codes that HE providers choose should be used sparingly and represent directly (or relate very closely to) the qualification subject(s) and content of the undergraduate course, as prescribed by the HECoS Implementation Guide2. This means that the tuition fee for a foundation year should reflect the subject(s) of the integrated undergraduate course,

rather than the specific individual subject modules within the foundation year itself.

Do you think people might try to game this system? DfE does, so we are told:

“The government will monitor whether this policy results in any significant or unusual changes to the usage of HECoS codes to register courses with foundation years. Whilst it is normal for some changes to occur to the usage of these codes from year-to-year, this policy should not result in significant changes to the HECoS codes that courses with foundation years are currently registered with, without corresponding changes to the qualification subjects and/or taught content of those courses.

An intriguing note suggests that these “level-less” courses (in general, not just the price group D cut) would not be eligible to be funded on a modular basis by the lifelong learning entitlement – the only way in is if you sign up for a full undergraduate course that includes a foundation year.

Quibbling

My instinct on this policy, as I have been over on the site before, is that it is not a good idea. Large parts of the annual foundation year intakes are from mature students or those who have not benefited from a traditional compulsory education. To be fair, Access to HE qualifications (traditionally offered in FE colleges, and generally more transferable than foundation year study) also fill this niche – but there is an attraction to starting at university, and on your chosen course, rather than taking a pre-qualification.

There is a progression and completion drop between foundation year students and others, but if you controlled for student characteristics (foundation year entrants will generally have lower, or no, level 3 attainment, for instance) it is not statistically significant.

I’ve previously highlighted spectacular work at Exeter, Sheffield, and Durham that uses foundation years to open very selective provision to a wider pool of students who are able to benefit from it. Both Oxford and Cambridge run foundation provision for disadvantaged young people. None of this provision is cheap to run – all of it would be affected by a cut in fee income.

We can already see what may happen instead – both Oxford and Cambridge (like many others) now offer a CertHE at level 4 as a possible alternative endpoint to their foundation years, for students who don’t want to progress to a full undergraduate course with them. It is hard to imagine any current provider of foundation years that would not look to this route – with the side effect that it will flatter national statistics on sub-degree qualifications. Students would thus access funding for four years of study (a CertHE plus a three year degree) via the LLE, which would limit access to longer courses or later career training for these groups.