On a Monday morning in late March, ninety strangers sit down together at the base of one of the towering pillars of glass and steel that pierce the spring blue skies of the City of London to talk about collaboration.
This was no ivory tower. At mixed tables across the room sat the emissaries of universities old and new, adult community colleges, specialist institutes and industry training centres – awarding providers, teaching providers, and sector bodies too.
Partners for the day, they heard from sector experts about the latest developments in the policy and practice of academic partnerships and then translated what they learned into their own institutional context through lively and productive small group discussions.
You might think that the previous day’s headlines would not have made for the most auspicious backdrop to proceedings, but if anything they instilled in the participants of IHE’s first annual Academic Partnerships Conference a clarity of purpose and an impassioned defence of the genuine importance and transformational value of high-quality collaborative provision.
Not all partnerships! The silent cry went up. And not all franchises either.
The value of partnership
Let’s be absolutely clear: academic partnerships are nothing new in higher education. England’s oldest universities – Oxford, Cambridge, London – are themselves nothing less than partnerships in motion, organisational structures evolved to facilitate collaboration across a number of independent self-governing institutions. Academic partnerships have remained the irresistible engine for the expansion of the UK’s higher education sector, driving wider access, greater diversity and more innovation in provision even while the specific models have continued to adapt to changing contexts and circumstances.
Today, fantastic examples of successful partnerships can be found everywhere you look and they can just as easily take the form of a validation agreement as a subcontractual relationship (aka franchise). While Degree Awarding Powers rightly remain a gold standard, many independent higher education providers would rather dedicate their precious time and focus towards the teaching, learning and industry knowledge exchange that forms the heart of their missions.
Partnerships should be prized and protected for their essential role in delivering higher education provision which responds to local, national and sector-specific needs. Let’s not forget that different groups of students with different backgrounds and different learning goals benefit enormously from higher education delivered through partnerships. We ignore their needs at our peril.
So everything is really fine? Move along, please, nothing to see here? Not quite. At IHE we are under no illusions that everyone in our sector has the same good intentions. It can be all too easy for those of us who work in higher education to believe that we are immune to some of the problems that rear their heads in other sectors. Sadly not. Education is a public good, a universal good, an elemental ingredient of civilisation, but this truth can make us naïve, obscuring the loopholes that still exist and the risks that operating in such an open system built on trust can create.
Regulating partners
IHE shares the Government’s ambition to strengthen oversight of subcontracted delivery that underpins DfE’s proposals but the proposals themselves miss the mark, as set out in our response to the consultation. If we are serious about doing this, then there are five areas of focus to which we must turn our collective attention – and fast:
- due diligence on every provider’s suitability as a partner, and the fitness and propriety of their management and governance;
- transparency on ownership and the terms of any contract for provision;
- accountability which is clearly assigned between each partner for the critical aspects of provision;
- quality and standards which are managed effectively by the relevant partner at the appropriate level; and
- flexibility in any oversight process so that we continue to facilitate the full range of diverse providers with something different to offer the higher education sector.
The absolute and non-negotiable starting point for an effective regulatory system must be that the regulator knows who is really in charge of every provider it regulates, and to be able to hold them to account. Ambitions aside, the OfS needs to be far more effective at identifying and keeping out individuals who are simply not fit and proper persons to share in the honour and responsibility of stewarding an English higher education institution.
Thankfully, the OfS proposals under consultation to strengthen its conditions of registration in relation to governance and student protection signal a new seriousness in its approach to this challenge – and are long overdue. The regulator is on the right track with its plans to take a much closer look at ownership, and in trying to identify unfair and inappropriate practices in relation to student recruitment and admissions.
Any institution in the business of academic partnerships should be taking a close look at these reforms. These are issues that are important to everyone with a stake in the success of the higher education sector. It is in the entire sector’s interest, in the public interest – and nobody’s more than students’ – that the regulator carves out a constructive and collaborative role for itself in this space, helping to facilitate the positive impact of partnerships while minimising the risk of criminal elements exploiting vulnerabilities in the system.
Rethinking registration
But could the OfS go further? What if there was a new approach to registration? A category explicitly intended for providers operating in partnership, designed to fill the gaps in oversight that universities cannot on their own, while letting them lead on the academic quality assurance that is their forte. A process built from the ground up to secure the most essential assurances, that can be proportionately applied to different sizes of institution, and efficiently delivered against clear timetables and stretching service standards.
A paradigm shift towards expecting every would-be delivery partner to complete such a due diligence process could, at a stroke, drive up standards of transparency and ethical behaviours, and better protect genuine students and the public purse from the threat of academic predators. Only a statutory regulator can really achieve this, with its access to intelligence from other public authorities. There is no reason why an awarding institution would not require a potential delivery partner to undertake this process prior to approving their first course. Indeed a centralised due diligence process delivered efficiently at scale could be used to streamline and speed up a partner’s own institutional approval processes.
At the same time we in the sector’s leadership should be working at pace with all stakeholders on the development of a better shared understanding and greater mutual agreement over what constitutes the most effective policies and practices in partnership provision. The absence of sector-wide standards or accepted best practice in this area, combined with higher education’s generally held principles of transparency being too often trumped by commercial sensitivities, are what has allowed pockets of poor practice and a risk of exploitation by bad actors to grow unchecked by effective regulation.
Simply requiring providers of an arbitrary size to register with the OfS without any critical analysis of the proportionality or effectiveness of current regulation will not achieve our aims and could easily make matters worse. Even the failure of one significant delivery partner to pass the ill-fitting regulatory hurdles set under the current proposals – let alone, say, a dozen – would create extreme jeopardy for thousands of students and place the system as a whole under unbearable pressure. We will sleepwalk into this situation if we do not change course.
It would be far better to make awarding institutions properly accountable for the policies, practices and performance of their delivery partners now, while giving them the regulatory tools to help them achieve more effective oversight, than to create a new Whitehall bureaucracy with a single point of predictable failure as DfE’s proposed designation gateway does. Far better to create a dedicated process focused on a deeper due diligence which properly accounts for the actual strengths, vulnerabilities and diversity of partnership models.
Academic partnerships are here to stay. A flexible, proportionate and efficient process which applies regulatory scrutiny where it is most needed can offer a foundation for sector-led efforts to enhance the quality, transparency and consistency that students should expect.
We all have a part to play. And we need to get this right. It is essential for the reputation of the higher education sector that we do. As partners in this collective endeavour, it is time for us to shine a light on this invaluable work that has spent too long in the shadows.
It would seem pretty clear that current regulation is not working given the endemic fraud and misuse of public money by a significant number of students at some franchised providers with significant incentives in the system for providers to turn a blind eye or even encourage such behaviour. The statistics uncovered by The Times are the tip of the iceberg and there will be a lot more to come out about the issue – we’re likely talking at the very least several hundred million pounds, perhaps billions of pounds, of public money lost to fraud and misuse.
It is a valid question about whether registration with the Office for Students will fix the problem. As I understand it, the franchised provider that has seen the biggest growth in the demographic thought to be linked to fraud and misuse is actually on the OfS register and received a TEF award last year which would suggest not…
Perhaps the solution is as simple as increasing the minimum hours of face-to-face attendance required to access maintenance loans combined with tougher enforcement of those requirements by the SLC and the OfS via regulation of lead providers. There is a good argument that the drive towards blended learning – partly due to the pandemic, partly due to the decrease in the value of maintenance support meaning most students now need to fit their studies around paid term-term employment – has made fraud and misuse a lot easier via reducing physical attendance requirements.
Yes. The problem with just relying on registration as currently configured to strengthen oversight of franchised providers is twofold:
It fails (and has failed) to uncover and keep out manifestly unfit individuals and unsuitable providers. Steps the OfS is now taking with its proposed new conditions of registration and revised process could make a significant difference here, as could the better coordination and data sharing that is now underway with other public authorities. As I mention in the piece, only a statutory body will be trusted with this kind of sensitive information/intelligence, not an individual university, hence this is a useful role OfS could play for partners of all sizes, provided the process is affordable and efficient.
OfS can’t just overlay the current regulatory framework and all of the conditions in the existing registration categories onto subcontractual models of delivery. It simply isn’t possible for a franchised provider to meet every condition independently of their partner(s). Decision-making and control sit in a variety of locations within any partnership. A maximalist approach of asserting that both providers must be equally responsible for all aspects of the provision would be both impractical and counterproductive – specific accountabilities need to be clearly assigned, not fuzzy and shared.
There needs to be a new category and process specifically designed for partnership provision – or at the very least detailed guidance on how the existing categories and conditions can flex and will be interpeted by assessors specifically to accommodate this different context.
Is there any reason to believe an OFS due diligence process would be transformational? Can we name any such process from a HE regulator that has transformed provision? What is the efficacy of such a process against actors whos engagement is insincere and driven just by finances? What reason is there to think that Universities with a direct financial interest in their partners- Universities who in many cases have clearly not been ignorant of attrition rates, expansion ect- are likely to prove effective regulators? Whats the value in giving the approving University tools if theres no external accountability?
I am sure, indeed know, there exists good provision in the partnership sector. But the proportion of fraudulent or extremely poor provision is really significant, and the good provision is not doing anything that cannot be achieved in the degree awarding sections of the sector. Given declining domestic student numbers from the 2030s anyway, seeking to close down domestic partnership routes would be the value for money choice for the public purse. Fortunately for partnership provision, I can’t name a case of such bold decision making by a HE regulator either.
OfS are starting to ask the right questions. Through better coordination and data sharing with other public authorities they can also start to access relevant intelligence and confidential information that should better inform their assessments of applicants, to identify actors who might be, as you say, insincere in their engagement.
They may not always succeed, but certainly they will be better positioned to undertake this work than the staff at an individual franchising university who – even with the best will in the world – are operating with only partial information and having to take quite a lot at face value and on trust.
My advice is certainly not to turn universities into regulators, but lead providers do clearly need to be held accountable for their franchised provision, so it is only right that we also give them more and better tools to conduct their own due diligence first and to calibrate their risk tolerance accordingly.
In our response to the DfE consultation we also recommend that lead providers should have business plans which set out manageable growth plans for each of their partnerships, and they should be actively monitoring changes and satisfying themselves that there is sufficient investment in teaching, learning and student support for the speed and scale of growth being achieved.
See: https://ihe.ac.uk/latest/publications/response-dfe-consultation-franchising-higher-education
All fair enough as part of a package to bring in accountability. But its the accountability you really need (how about some liability? That would cause some thoughts!), because the University knows both the enrolment growth rate and the rates of failure and attrition, both of which are usually obvious huge red flags without any toolkit at all.
Sounds like your putting a positive slant on that direction- which is all to the good in terms of what might actually come in. But while some do have the best will in the world, its clear we have to structure in clear incentives that work for the cases where this is absent, because I think its clear such actors can currently use the system to generate significant volumes.