David Behan’s independent report into the Office for Students (OfS) Fit for the Future argued that the regulator needed to be more focused on core objectives, shifting from a “safety net” regulator chasing down those who fall foul of the conditions of registration to a regulator that enables improvement.
The Secretary of State for Education liked Behan’s report so much that she appointed him interim chair of OfS, tasked with implementing his own recommendations. Now OfS has published for consultation a draft strategy to take it through the remainder of this parliament – and you have until 20 February to respond.
First off, the regulator has pared its priorities down to three general areas: quality, student experience, and sector resilience, each of which is broken down into two objectives, with equality of opportunity conceived of as weaving throughout the priorities and objectives.
Quality
- Students receive a high quality education that has a significant and enduring positive impact on their lives and careers, delivered by institutions that continue to improve the quality of their courses.
- Prospective students have a range of high quality options and are well equipped to exercise informed choice about what, where, when and how they study.
The wider student experience
- Students receive the higher education experiences they were promised.
- Students benefit from rich and rewarding wider environments that help them to make the most of their time in higher education.
Sector resilience
- A financially resilient sector delivers high quality higher education and student choice in the context of constrained finances.
- Effectively governed institutions successfully navigate an environment of increased financial and strategic risk, enabling students to reap the benefits of higher education while giving taxpayers confidence that public funding is used appropriately.
OfS is publishing its plans in advance of the government’s own planned HE strategy, which is expected to appear next summer – and the foreword from chief executive Susan Lapworth signals that the regulator will need to continue to work on its relationships both with the HE sector and other government bodies to ensure it is prepared to execute whatever that strategy might require in the way of reforms to higher education.
Quality
In the quality basket OfS identified the challenge of tackling pockets of poor quality, albeit against a backdrop of general excellence, and creating a quality assessment system that encourages continuous improvement. Broadly the objective here is to articulate a new approach to quality assessment, but one that retains a focus on equality.
The Teaching Excellence Framework is proposed as “the core of our new integrated approach to quality” but it’s a version of the TEF that is less about awarding badges and more about interrogating education provision, identifying features of good practice and areas for improvement.
OfS plans to publish a Quality Risk Register – building on and aligning with the generally well received Equality of Opportunity Risk Register – to help frame provider thinking on quality and direct regulatory attention to particularly problematic areas. Transnational provision will be folded into quality, freedom of speech will be encouraged and protected (pending government decisions about where it’s going with the Freedom of Speech Act) and OfS will “explore” options for alignment with European quality standards.
There will be work around student choice, including working with Skills England on whether the courses available deliver on skills needs, supporting the rollout of LLE, and collecting data about the aggregate impact of portfolio changes on student choice. And, potentially, a data strategy that depends less on lag data allows for greater agility.
The wider student interest (and experience)
It’s this area that can be a bit murky when it comes to the regulator’s roles and responsibilities – the draft strategy suggests that while students care a lot about their wider experience OfS doesn’t always have direct regulatory levers to try to improve it.
There is a broad undertaking to publish information about the student experience, champion good practice, and to protect consumer rights, including through developing a model student contract. Those following such things closely might ask what happened to the last strategy’s promise of action in that area, and whether OfS will be successful in gaining formal consumer law enforcement powers, which would need legislation.
There’s also a strange bit that says OfS will work with the Office of the Independent Adjudicator to “secure reciprocal sharing of intelligence” – something many would assume was already happening given complaints data is supposed to be a key bit of the way OfS monitors providers – and given that this piece of secondary legislation and this collaboration agreement were supposed to already be delivering it.
Otherwise OfS will continue to support mental health, and execute the new regulatory condition on harassment and sexual misconduct.
Whether you view this section as undercooked will depend on whether you think the regulator should have a view about “the wider experience” beyond making provision to ensure students get what their provider said they would.
There’s a callback to the Behan review which suggests that the area of focus on “wider experience” for the regulator should be governance – there can be variation in what is offered to students as part of the experience but governors should in theory be across what is offered and have a grip of the relationship between the “wider offer” and broad institutional objectives for student success. Testing this relationship is arguably a more useful thing for the regulator to do than trying to legislate what the student experience is or should be in a diverse sector.
Sector resilience
In the area of what we understand is now being referred to as “finsus” OfS undertakes to do more to understand the financial challenges facing the sector, strengthen provider financial management, maintain an up to date assessment of market exit risk, including requiring those at greater risk to have credible student protection provisions in place. All this will include collecting data “more frequently and flexibly” – meaning we’re much less likely to see assessment of the sector’s finances that depend on hypotheticals.
On franchising, OfS signals that regulatory requirements will increase for those providers with significant partnership activity.
There’s also a sentence that bears quite a lot of unpacking about leadership and governance:
We will work with the sector to support a stronger understanding of our management and governance requirements, equipping institutions to assess and improve their own capabilities to the benefit both of students and taxpayers.
This sentence picks up the concern that has been raised by OfS that leadership and governance in the sector may not in all cases be fit for purpose, if by “purpose” what is meant taking really difficult decisions, including about possible radical structural change, to secure the provider’s long term financial sustainability. More on this to come no doubt.
The i in team
Finally, there’s a section at the end that signals the way in which OfS might start to judge its own success via a series of so-called “I statements” – a vehicle for “communicating the future we want to bring about.” They are intended to describe what achieving its strategic objectives will look and feel like for students, institutions, taxpayers and employers in a clear and accessible way, and are weighted towards students, as the “primary beneficiaries” of the proposed strategy.
Some reflect parts of the NSS (like “My course is well organised and delivered, enabling me to acquire knowledge and develop skills relevant to my subject area”), although it will need to find a way of surveying all the students not covered by it to test those. Others are refreshing insofar as they suggest that not all enforcement work has to be done by OfS itself: “I understand my rights as a student and I know what to do if I feel I am not getting what I was promised from my institution” is an example there.
Providers get “I can engage constructively and transparently with the OfS and am confident I won’t be taken by surprise,” “I am confident my institution would be treated fairly should it encounter challenges,” and “I understand the OfS’s regulatory priorities and requirements and am confident its regulatory approach is driven by the interests of students and informed by the expertise in the higher education sector.”
Overall the regulator seems to be preparing to do a lot of the things that the Behan review suggested it should, operating within the current statutory framework in which it finds itself. But the strategy seems to indicate that the regulator is drawing on a more nuanced assessment of the various interests in play in higher education provision and evolving a version of regulation that broadly seeks to facilitate and improve rather than constrain and finger-wag.
There will be complexities inherent in navigating public, student, and provider interests (the latter to the extent that provider sustainability and delivery is a matter of public and student interest) – and if OfS can pull it off over the coming five years then the sector might just be prepared to forgive and forget the rocky start OfS got off to.