A governance gap puts student fairness at risk

The proposed new condition of registration from the Office for Students (OfS), C6 “Treating students fairly”, has mostly been read as a consumer protection measure.

That is understandable – it covers marketing claims, contract terms, refunds, complaints, and whether institutions deliver what they’ve promised. But that framing misses how far C6 also reaches into whether institutions can operationally deliver a fair experience once those students arrive.

A useful way to think about this comes from Basil Bernstein’s distinction between the instructional and the regulative. The instructional covers the curriculum, teaching, and assessment, while the regulative is the environment around it – the rules, relationships, timings, systems, and conditions in which students study. C6 is aimed overwhelmingly at that second category – clarity, timeliness, good faith, and whether students are treated properly in the course of their education.

Academic judgement should remain protected, but the conditions in which students experience fairness extend well beyond academic judgement alone, and that’s where professional services come in.

A student’s sense of fair treatment is shaped by whether the timetable clashes, how their deadlines are structured throughout the year, whether support is accessible and responsive, whether a promised small-group teaching model was properly resourced, and how clearly course changes are communicated.

When a student faces four summative deadlines in a single week because no one was looking across their modules, they’ve been failed by the absence of anyone holding the whole picture – and by a lack of tools to enable it – rather than by any one marker.

None of this is trivial, none of it requires academic judgement, and much of it sits with departmental and faculty operational leads, registry, planning, systems teams, student support, and the wider professional services infrastructure. In many cases, these are the people through whom fairness is actually delivered.

From goodwill to exposure

Of course, this has always been true, but what C6 changes is the consequence. Until now, a gap between what a course intended and what the institution could operationally deliver might have appeared as a quality issue, surfacing perhaps in module feedback or National Student Survey (NSS) comments. Under C6, it looks much more like regulatory exposure.

In a financially pressured sector, institutions have long relied on informal fixes, local exceptions, and staff goodwill to bridge the gap between promise and delivery – but a regulatory duty to treat students fairly is likely to make that gap much harder to ignore.

Consequence without influence

That creates an awkward governance problem. If C6 increases the compliance burden and regulatory risk attached to operational delivery, it doesn’t automatically follow that the people responsible for that delivery will have more say. In many institutions the likely pattern is familiar – risk and responsibility flow towards professional services, while voice remains concentrated in academic committees and senior groups that don’t always test whether institutional promises are deliverable in practice.

The people who could tell a committee that a commitment is undeliverable – the timetabler, the planner, the quality officer – are rarely in the room when that commitment is made, and rarely asked afterwards why it failed. The result is a duty owned by people who never agreed to it – a risk to students, and to the institution’s credibility. Three things should follow.

Getting in the room

Institutions preparing for C6 should bring operational professional services fully into education governance – and that means faculty operations, registry, planning, estates, systems, and student support as well as learning and teaching specialists. If these teams are expected to carry the delivery risk, they should be involved in shaping the decisions that create it.

But the integration must work both ways. Just as operations need a real voice in education governance, education needs a real presence in operational governance, because the people designing and prioritising resource allocations, estates, systems, and processes are increasingly making decisions that are educational in substance, even when they look administrative or operational.

That requires operational colleagues to understand our duties in education, and to recognise that a university isn’t just another business processing transactions – the student sits at the heart of these decisions, and a planning choice can be a decision about whether a student is treated fairly. Education governance has long concerned itself with OfS conditions – C6 is one that the operational layer now needs to understand just as well.

Naming deliverability

OfS should spell out that fair treatment includes the capacity to deliver what’s been promised, not merely the intention to do so – otherwise accountability falls into a familiar gap, where academics can treat a failure as operational, operational teams can treat it as inherited design, and nobody owns the student harm that follows.

Good intentions are exactly what a financially stretched sector will reach for first. There’s a real and legitimate distinction between a commitment defeated by something truly outside a provider’s control – a withdrawn placement, a change in professional requirements – and one that was never deliverable in the first place because no one tested it. The first is reasonable care and skill and should be protected – the second is over-promising, and “we meant it” shouldn’t excuse it.

Guidance that names deliverability as part of fairness would push the test back to the point of promise – away from “did we mean this?” and towards “did we ever check we could do it, for these students, and in these conditions?”

Mapping the gaps

Providers should also map their own promise-to-delivery gaps now. Many will likely find that the biggest risks sit in the operational layer around the curriculum rather than in the curriculum itself – the layer everyone depends on, but which too often sits outside the main frame of educational decision-making.

Mapping this honestly means more than a risk register – it means looking across modules rather than down each one, testing each commitment a course makes against the timetables, estates, workload models, people, and systems that carry it, and asking the operational colleagues who run those things whether the promise is real before it’s made to a student.

Most institutions have likely never looked at their offer in this way – the condition is in effect an invitation, or a warning, to start.

The argument for taking professional services seriously has often been made in the language of culture, respect, and good institutional practice. Under C6, it may need to be made in the language institutions understand more quickly – compliance, risk, and delivery. If the sector is serious about treating students fairly, it needs to involve the people who make that fairness real.