OfS reported for non-compliance

You remember that one story about OfS accidently granting a random company degree awarding powers, and then having to speedily revoke the statutory instrument before they came in to force? All because they had a similar but not identical name to a learning provider that actually had qualified for DAPs?

This is the kind of mistake that really spooks parliamentarians, so the thirty-eighth report of the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments takes the time to comment on every recently laid degree awarding power regulation suggesting that maybe some kind of reliable identifying number or code might be helpful in future. Indeed, it emphasises that not doing so “fails to comply with proper legislative process”.

There are generally not hard and fast rules on stuff like this, so we should take a moment to bask in the golden irony that OfS has been written up for not conforming to “good legislative practice” that has just been invented (albeit for good reason).

For each of four DAPs orders – for the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, TEC Partnership, Cornwall College, and the revised LTE Group effort – OfS had to submit a memorandum to:

Explain why no unique identifier is given for [the provider] in article 2 (for example, an address or a company number (if any)).

The position, backed up by Department for Education, is rather mystifying. Unless a provider is a registered company (in which cases a Companies House number is provided), just using the legal name is sufficiently clear. As alert readers will note, it was an incorrect company number that tipped us all off that all was not well with LTE Group Limited.

We do learn that OfS is “considering” whether a reference to an organisation’s UK Provider Reference Number (UKPRN) in a footnote or the explanatory note might help. The UKPRN exists exactly to ensure that we can accurately refer to a particular provider with complete confidence – it appears in most sector data releases (apart from UCAS, for reasons too depressing to go in to).

So the right thing to do is straightforward, obvious to all, and complies with a long-standing existing practice understood by pretty much everyone. And OfS is “considering it”. And in the meantime it can’t even award DAPs without getting reported – a designation that technically means parliament could amend, withdraw, or debate the statutory instrument.