A few months ago I went into a charity shop and bought a kettle for £7.50.
When I got it home, it didn’t work. The bit at the bottom that you stand the kettle on was fine. The kettle itself didn’t do anything. No light. No water heating. Nothing.
What I knew, instinctively, was that I should take it back. So I did. The woman behind the till apologised, gave me my £7.50 back, and pointed me to the next nearest shop in case I wanted a replacement.
I don’t know who the regulator for second-hand kettles is. But I knew something had gone wrong, that I was entitled to my money back, and that the shop was the right place to start.
Most consumer transactions in this country work like that. If something doesn’t work, you go back. If the going-back goes wrong, you escalate.
For students in higher education, neither of those things are really true.
Office for what?
The Office for Students has just published a consultation on a new rule – Condition C6 – that would require universities to “treat students fairly”.
It comes with a stack of evidence about why the current setup isn’t working. Half of students said they understand and could describe their rights – among undergraduates, that drops to 44 per cent. Three-quarters said the promises they thought their university had made hadn’t been fully met.
Sixty per cent didn’t know how to make a complaint externally. Eighteen per cent had heard of OfS itself. Eight per cent had heard of the Office of the Independent Adjudicator. If a kettle shop got those numbers in customer research, it would shut.
OfS has read the numbers and reached the right diagnosis. Students are being treated unfairly, and the existing rules aren’t working. They’ve also reached a sensible structural answer – a duty to treat students fairly, with seven principles, a list of things universities must always do, a list of things they must never do, and a single webpage where students can find the documents that govern their relationship with their university.
As bits of regulation go, it’s the most ambitious thing OfS has ever done on the relationship between universities and students. I want to argue, though, that they’ve got something very wrong about who the rule is for and how it’s supposed to work.
Supply, demand and the missing student
OfS gets the supply side. They’ve spent years thinking about provider conduct.
Long list of bad practices, a list of documents that should be on a webpage, illustrative examples of what good and bad behaviour look like. All of that is fine.
What they don’t get is the demand side – the thing the OfS evidence base is actually about.
Half of students can’t describe their rights. The way OfS has chosen to fix that is to require providers to publish information on a webpage. The provider is the actor expected to deliver the rights education. The student is the actor expected to find the webpage and make sense of what’s on it.
The problem is that students are not kettle-buyers. Unlike when a student buys something from a shop and it breaks, they don’t instinctively recognise that they’re being treated unfairly and if they do, they don’t have the knowledge or the confidence to act on those rights. They don’t think about the relationship that way, they don’t know what to look for, and even when they find the documents – which most of them won’t – the documents are written for lawyers and managers, not for them.
Why students don’t complain
Why don’t students complain when something goes wrong? The business school literature has actually done quite a lot of work on this. There are five main reasons.
The first is opportunity cost. Complaining takes time. If you’re a postgraduate taught student here for nine months and your supervisor isn’t responding to emails, the question isn’t whether the supervisor is failing in their job. It’s whether spending a month arguing about it leaves you any time to finish the dissertation.
The second is conflict aversion. Most people don’t enjoy a row, especially with people who hold power over them.
The third is confidence and cultural capital. Some students grew up in homes where their parents knew their rights and got things done. Some didn’t. The polling already tells us that students from particular groups start university with less confidence about their rights than others.
The fourth is fear of retribution. If you’re in a small department, on a small course, and the academic you’d be complaining about is the one marking your dissertation, you might decide it’s not worth it.
The fifth is the obvious one. You can’t complain about something if you don’t know it’s a thing you’re allowed to complain about. C6 doesn’t really address any of these. It cuts none of the time costs. It builds no anonymous channels. It assumes confidence and cultural capital. It has no anti-retaliation protection.
And on rights knowledge, its answer is “publish a webpage” – which is mostly what the existing setup already does.
Once again, with feeling
I’ve made the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) analogy on this site before, and it bears repeating because the BBFC has worked out something OfS hasn’t.
The BBFC long ago decided that the way to get audiences to understand what’s appropriate viewing isn’t to publish guidance on a website. It’s to put a short reel before every film at the cinema, telling you what U, PG, 12A, 15 and 18 mean, and what this particular film has been classified as and why.
If you want to change behaviour, you have to meet people where they are.
Polish higher education law has worked this out too. The right to know your rights is written into legislation, and student associations are modestly funded to deliver rights education through events, materials and training. It costs almost nothing. It’s structural. It moves the needle.
C6 has neither a BBFC reel nor a Polish-style funded duty. It has a webpage, some standard wording in an annex, and a passive principle that the actor with the conflict of interest is expected to deliver.
Where SUs come in
The bit of C6 that absolutely cannot stay as drafted is the bit about students’ unions.
The consultation mentions SUs twice, both in passing. There’s no defined role. There’s no specified resourcing. There’s nothing requiring SUs to publish what they’ve done.
There’s a reason this matters. The first principle of C6 is that universities should help students understand their rights. But the rights students need help understanding are rights against the university. Asking the university to be the main source of that help is a structural conflict of interest. The obvious answer – the in-house body whose constitutional purpose is to represent students against the university – is sat there. OfS hasn’t engaged with it.
OfS already knows what to do. The E6 free speech condition has an “appropriately informed to ensure understanding” test plus an induction training requirement. For free speech, OfS has accepted that publishing a webpage isn’t enough – you need active education, delivered as part of induction. The same logic applies to fairness rights.
OfS hasn’t drawn the line across. The most powerful thing C6 could do, and currently doesn’t, is require universities to actively educate students on their rights at induction, and to deliver that education in collaboration with the SU where there is one. Modestly funded. Reportable each year. Polish-style.
The most important consultation of the decade
If you work in or with an SU, and you only respond to one OfS consultation this decade, this is the one.
C6 is the most direct piece of regulation aimed at the relationship between universities and students that OfS has ever produced. The defaults that get set in autumn 2026 are the ones students will be living with for the rest of the decade.
The structural choice – moving from a thinking-about-fairness duty to an actually-doing-fairness duty – is right.
But as drafted, C6 hands the rights-education job to the actor with the conflict of interest, and assumes that publishing a webpage will fix a problem that publishing webpages has demonstrably failed to fix already.
OfS can do better. SUs can argue for an active rights education duty, for a defined role for SUs in delivering it, and for resourcing that lets us do it.
We can argue for the BBFC reel. We can argue for the Polish model. We can ask OfS to use what it already learned from E6.
If we don’t, we’ll spend the next decade explaining to students why the rule that was supposed to fix this didn’t. And the charity shop will still have a better complaints culture than most universities in England.
