University of Wales Trinity Saint David (UWTSD) has just announced it will be closing Lampeter.

Last year 200 were jobs at risk at Aberystwyth University, and an email sent to staff yesterday by Bangor’s VC Edmund Burke warned that challenges facing the sector meant that compulsory redundancies could not be ruled out there – with another 200 jobs set to go.

Swansea University has increased its savings plan by £30 million and more staff could leave on top of the 342 who have departed in the last year-and-a-half.

Cardiff Metropolitan ran a voluntary scheme last year, the University of South Wales says it is to shed another 90 jobs and cut courses and research, and Cardiff University has been all over the news over its plans to shed 400 academic posts and shut some academic schools.

Staff will be worried – and so will students.

Back in 2017, Welsh Government starting consulting on whether there would be benefits in requiring higher education providers to produce student protection plans that could be shared with prospective and existing learners to provide information on how they would be supported if their learning were to be disrupted due to closure of a course/campus, or failure of the provider.

Somewhere along the way, that was watered down from a universal requirement to something that the newly proposed Commission “may” require a provider to produce.

Seven years on, Medr (Wales’ Commission for Tertiary Education and Research) has only just been set up – and it hasn’t (yet) got around to even consulting on issuing guidance on the preparation and revision of them.

Medr’s draft strategy says it will establish guidance around learner protection plans as part of its regulatory framework by 1 August 2026, supporting the diversity of learners so that all have appropriate opportunities for involvement and representation.

By the time that happens campuses will have closed, courses will have been cut and any number of services and elective modules will have been chopped back.

That’s not to say that the overall idea was a great one – you only have to look at Student Protection Plans in England to see some of the holes in the overall theory.

In theory, there was an opportunity to learn from the mistakes made in England – I had a rattle through the issues with everything from optional modules not being defined as “material” to the repeated failure of “teach out” to the lack of focus on things other than the course that are contractual on the site here and here.

But the point is that as things stand, whatever enhanced protection was to be on offer for students in Wales looks like it’ll be too late.

Yesterday, Vikki Howells, Wales’ Minister for Further and Higher Education Vikki Howells told the Senedd that she has asked Medr “as a matter of urgency” to look into Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) rules around university collaboration, saying that there was not currently a straightforward answer around what is permitted.

If Welsh Government is still serious about student protection, she might usefully also ask Medr “as a matter of urgency” to look into Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) rules around tuition fee increases, cuts and changes to provision after a student has signed up, what students’ rights are and how they can be enforced – and where providers are relying on their current contracts, where those contracts might be giving too much discretion for a provider to impose changes.

It does only have eight to look at.