Quality assurance moves faster than the speed of regulation

Regulation in action – a visit by the Office for Students to Buckinghamshire New University’s business provision resulted in a breach in registration condition B2 being identified.

The issue was the quality of learning resources (specifically what was on the virtual learning environment), the pattern of teaching delivery, and the way what was taught was informed by discipline-specific academic research.

Rather than bring in the regulatory big guns – de-registration, recruitment restrictions, fines – OfS has been happy to collaborate with BNU to address the issues and mitigate risk. In the words of Jean Arnold, the keep of the register: “important steps have been taken to ensure students can be confident that they’re getting the academic experience they were promised”.

An example, then, of a quality assurance regime that is doing what it needs to. Up to a point.

The investigation visits happened in early 2023, with engagement starting in 2022. This was based on a decision to investigate made at the back end of the 2021-22 academic year, itself prompted by analysis of data covering – at the absolute latest – what was happening in the Covid-drenched 2020-21 academic year.

The full-time undergraduate students to whom that data referred to probably graduated in 2022-23. The 2022-23 intake who got the investigation visit will have completed this summer. All of these students would have experienced teaching and learning resources that, in the eyes of the OfS, did not meet national standards. None of them would have seen a single benefit from the actions of the regulator – none of them will be compensated for what was acknowledged to be a below-par experience.

The OfS postulates that students from five rounds of recruitment didn’t get what they should have expected. They will be pleased that future students can be more confident, but it doesn’t change a single thing about the experience they had.

This morning sees a regulatory case report added alongside the original investigation report. It broadly repeats the initial, historic, findings – the new bit is a single paragraph.

While regulatory interventions were an option, we have decided to take no further regulatory action, and to close the investigation into business and management courses at the provider. When coming to this judgement, we were conscious that we should not impose an intervention that is any more burdensome for the provider than needed to address the areas of concern and to incentivise future compliance. The provider has demonstrated to the OfS that it has acted swiftly and comprehensively to restore compliance with condition B2, and to address the wider concerns raised in the quality assessment report. We have decided, therefore, that the OfS does not need to intervene. Doing so would not be in line with our risk-based approach to regulation, or an effective use of OfS resources

To be clear, it is very encouraging that the provider has taken action where it had seen changes. The problem for OfS is that it was already doing so. The original report talks about BNU’s “Curriculum 23” initiative – a broad programme of curriculum redesign and updates that kicked off in September 2023. This came alongside the introduction of an “engagement and retention” initiative that again addressed the ways in which students experienced their course. There were, as the report notes, a lot of changes happening in the business school at that point.

The question we need to ask is whether the improvements that have and are being made were in any way driven by the decision of OfS to investigate – a decision that OfS “would not divulge to us the precise reasons” for. And an investigation that seemed to ignore more recent data and findings that suggested BNU was actively working to address issues it had already spotted.

It is likely that some of the students who are only today seeing a regulatory response regarding the course they have recently finished did benefit from the work that the university was doing to improve their experience. Certainly the National Student Survey (the only regulatory means we have of including student opinions) suggests as much.

OfS has frequently tried to establish itself as the sole arbiter of quality and standards in higher education. In doing so, it has chosen largely to ignore the quality and standards assurance (and enhancement) processes that exist within providers. Processes that are able to, and frequently do, spot and address issues in-year.

The OfS, however good its existing or new processes might be, can’t be everywhere all the time. The real-time data that the design of this approach is predicated on isn’t going to arrive any time soon. Perhaps the international consensus on the primacy of institutional processes, and the role of a national expert body in assessing the quality of these processes, needs a second look.

Because a response five years after the fact helps no-one.