There’s a total of £2m available from the Office for Students for collaborative three year projects (ending 31 July 2027) aimed at addressing equality of opportunity in English higher education, addressing issues linked to those raised in the Equality of Opportunity Risk Register (EORR).

You have until 25 October to submit a completed bid template, including around 5,000 words of text, which will be assessed by OfS officers. Though bidding consortia need to include an eligible higher education provider (Approved Fee Cap registration), they can include (and indeed be led by) any organisation that providers services in connection with higher education, though each organisation can only lead one proposal.

Though OfS hasn’t run this kind of collaborative funded enhancement activity before to my knowledge, it draws upon a rich history of HEFCE funded projects throughout the late 90s and early 00s. Given the amount of change that the organisation has been through during this time, it is unlikely that much cultural memory persists.

Back in the day, I used to run stuff like this for HEFCE (shout out to anyone who had an FDTL project!) and there are a few aspects that raised my eyebrows.

• The total funding pot is very small. In 2004ish, a large collaborative enhancement project would have been funded at around £250,000 for each year of activity. This enabled project teams to employ dedicated project managers alongside buying out the time of academics and professional staff. A dedicated project manager is fundamental to the success of a collaboration in my experience – you get a lot more expertise (as the staff with the on the ground knowledge use 100 per cent of their project time contributing that knowledge and experience) and it is easier to keep momentum going.
• This is a single round of bidding. You put in a lot of work to write even a short proposal like this (not so much putting the words on the page, more getting the kind of agreement you need from various parts of various providers to be able to write them with confidence). At Jisc and the HE Academy (now Advance HE) UKOER collaborative projects involved several higher education providers working with one of the much missed HE Academy Subject Centres (which provided central support and project staff) – negotiating collaboration agreements was a huge and time consuming issue. The accepted way to avoid people having to do a pile of unfunded preparatory work for no benefit was a two stage bidding round – stage one bids contained just an outline proposal and broad agreements from senior staff in each collaborative partner, and if successful, stage two bids filled in the fine detail. On some occasions (HEFCE’s CETLs spring to mind) successful projects at stage one were allocated a small amount of funding to develop a detailed bid for stage two – if you don’t do this you are presenting larger providers and organisations with an advantage.
• The bids are assessed by OfS staff. Earlier programmes legitimised bid assessments by using an independent assessment panel. This made bidders a lot more confident about the validity of assessments. Each panel would have been chaired by a board member, and involve volunteers from the sector (who would gain experience in working with the regulator).
• Monitoring and evaluation is done in house. OfS staff are generally hugely talented and hard working, but monitoring and evaluating funded projects is not something that many will have done before. HEFCE used to contract with the TQEF National Co-ordination Team and then the HE Academy to monitor projects, reporting back quarterly to a responsible officer within HEFCE. This allowed for expertise in the subject matter to be applied to monitoring activity, and made for more hands on and responsive project interactions.