Why structural racism sits outside the vision of the Office for Students

Debates in recent months about Cambridge stepping back from state school admission targets, including commentary by Lee Elliot Major, show how conversations about inequality in higher education often ricochet back to familiar terrain around schooling background and admissions policy.

These debates, of course, matter and contain value. But they also dominate the discourse so completely that they obscure a deeper issue, namely that the contours of regulation shape what is visible and therefore what can be acted upon.

It is here that structural racism becomes difficult for regulation to see.

Yes, disparities are widely measured but are not often interpreted as evidence of it, though it radiates through student experience and remains largely unnamed within the regulator’s core vocabulary as a systemic risk to quality.

By structural racism, I mean the ways in which everyday practices and the design of systems can, over time, produce inequitable patterns within higher education. This is not to suggest universities can unilaterally resolve societal inequalities beyond their reach, however, it recognises that institutional systems within higher education can nonetheless reproduce unequal conditions that shape student experience.

Inequality in higher education is not only about who gets in, it is also shaped by the structures students encounter once they turn up, the organisational conditions that influence whether they feel fully included and able to thrive.

Yet structural inequality, particularly structural racism, remains difficult for regulation to articulate directly, even when disparities are clearly visible in the data. Where issues are not explicitly articulated within the regulatory framework, they are harder to assess, challenge, or treat as systemic risks to student experience and quality, allowing patterns to become embedded and begin to calcify.

Design or disparity

Access and participation plans (APPs) have sharpened the focus on outcomes, with institutions expected to demonstrate progress in closing gaps.

The framework assumes institutions will analyse the causes of persistent disparities, and regulatory scrutiny largely concentrates on whether gaps narrow over time rather than on how deeply institutions interrogate the systems that produce them.

Higher education repeatedly returns to questions of access, while the organisational conditions shaping student experience remain less visible within the regulatory view.

Since the 2021 Sewell Report questioned the language of institutional racism, public bodies have been more cautious in how they frame structural explanations for inequality. Disparities associated with race are extensively measured, but they are more often described as outcome gaps or equality risks than as evidence of structural discrimination.

England measures inequality extensively but is twitchy about describing the systems that produce it.

This caution reflects a broader political climate in which discussions of heritage, migration, and national identity have intensified sensitivities around how racism is named. As Stuart Hall argued in It Ain’t Half Racist, Mum, the language used to describe racism shapes whether it is recognised as structural or dismissed as incidental. Where structural racism is not explicitly articulated within regulatory vocabulary, it is less likely to be treated as an organisational design issue and more likely to register as a statistical disparity.

Name it

Looking comparatively, South Africa’s higher education framework explicitly names racism and structural inequality, reflecting a post-apartheid nation building project that’s far from resolved. Movements such as “Rhodes Must Fall” remind us of that unfinished work. The system nevertheless begins from a premise that inequality is embedded.

Unlike countries that have had to confront colonial injustice within their own public institutions, England has not reconstituted its higher education system through an explicit coming to terms with colonialism.

In New Zealand and Canada, treaty and reconciliation based frameworks embed obligations to Māori and Indigenous peoples across public institutions, including universities. These systems differ in history and design, but they share one idea: system-level harms require system-level vocabularies. England’s regulatory framework has evolved without an equivalent domestic vocabulary that calls out structural racism or systemic inequality.

As a result, inequality is often treated as a measurable outcome rather than as a structural pattern. Staffing illustrates this. Chronic under-representation of racially minoritised staff, particularly in senior academic and professional roles, is well documented. While staffing itself sits outside the Office for Students’ (OfS) direct remit, institutional hierarchies shape many of the experiences and outcomes regulators are concerned with across the student journey.

Culture is not abstract

Research by Nicola Rollock, alongside work such as Gatby and Sanderson’s on professional services hierarchies, shows how racialised harm is reproduced not so much through isolated acts as through everyday institutional practice. For example, how credibility is assigned, whose concerns are taken seriously, and who is proximate to decision making power.

Within the regulatory framework, however, these dynamics tend to register simply as disparities or isolated incidents, rather than as the product of oppressive systems shaping institutional life.

This is where debate can become muddled.

Vice-chancellors are right to argue that culture cannot be regulated directly. But culture is not abstract. It is produced through institutional architecture that shapes who is hired and promoted, who sits on committees, whose complaints are believed, and whose knowledge is recognised. Seeing these systems as peripheral to quality narrows what regulation is able to see, and therefore what it is able to address.

There is also a regulatory asymmetry worth acknowledging. Racial harassment is explicitly addressed within the regulatory framework, yet structural racism is not articulated as a systemic risk in its own right.

The OfS’s approach to sexual misconduct under E6 shows what happens when an issue is treated as serious and deserving of sustained attention. Institutions were required to revisit staff–student relationship policies that may have gone untouched for years, scrutinise power dynamics within postgraduate research supervision, redesign reporting routes, expand training provision, and work more closely with specialist charities and support services. Public communications and institutional websites were updated to clarify expectations and processes.

Sexual misconduct came to be understood not as a series of isolated complaints, but as a systemic risk to student experience and quality. While racial harassment falls within E6, it has not been operationalised with comparable visibility or sustained regulatory focus. Addressing it with similar force would require recognising structural racism itself as systemically produced rather than primarily as an outcome disparity.

Expanding the language

Disparities can signal structural patterns, but only when they are interpreted and assessed as such.

Data alone does not name the institutional processes that produce persistent racial inequalities. Without explicit articulation, structural racism is more likely to register as a statistical outcome than as a systemic condition shaping the whole arc of student experience. Across the sector, substantial structural work has already been underway including sustained efforts to interrogate awarding gaps and engagement with frameworks such as the Race Equality Charter, reflecting ongoing institutional commitment.

Structural racism could instead be understood through risks that the regulator already knows how to address. In practice, this would include risks to fairness in assessment processes, where persistent awarding gaps that cannot be fully explained by prior attainment may reasonably raise questions about how performance is evaluated and moderated, and risks to the credibility of complaints processes where patterns of harm undermine trust.

Framed in this way, structural racism becomes visible as a quality concern embedded in institutional practice. Naming it as such does not require universities to repair societal fissures beyond their reach but brings into view harms that might otherwise remain hidden from scrutiny.

An E6-style approach would not require the OfS to adjudicate racism or regulate culture, both of which sit outside its statutory role. It would shift the emphasis from asking where a gap exists to examining what institutional arrangements plausibly produce persistent patterns, and whether providers have credible mechanisms to identify and address racialised harm as it emerges.

These questions sit at the intersection of quality and equality of opportunity and fall within the OfS’s existing concerns. Greater harmonisation between APPs and E6 would allow these dynamics to be assessed in a single regulatory frame rather than as separate tracks.

A period of leadership transition creates a natural moment to reflect on the scope and vocabulary of its regulatory framework. Structural racism is not absent from regulatory discourse, but it is not positioned as a systemic risk.

Expanding the language through which it is recognised would not stretch the regulator’s remit so much as clarify it, which ultimately shapes what regulation is able to recognise and respond to.