The Office for Students published its Explorations: Student Experiences of Accommodation report in June 2026.
It is the most comprehensive, student-centred evidence base on accommodation the regulator has produced to date.
Based on a survey of 1,293 first-year students and qualitative research with a further 21 participants, it paints an important picture of how accommodation shapes students’ lives, choices, and wellbeing.
It is rigorous, timely, and welcome. It also has a significant blind spot, one that my doctoral research on Foundation Year (FY) students reveals, and one with consequences that reach far beyond any single student cohort.
What the OfS got right
The report confirms what many of us in higher education have long argued: accommodation is not a peripheral concern. It is central to whether students feel they belong, whether they succeed academically, and whether they can afford to stay. Several findings stand out.
Information inequality in accommodation decision-making is real and consequential. Students entering via UCAS Extra, Clearing, or as their insurance choice, reported reduced options, constrained choices, and lower satisfaction, not because of their own failings, but because the timing of the admissions system left them with whatever accommodation remained. The OfS rightly identifies this as a problem. So does my research, and not only in relation to accommodation.
On-campus, provider-maintained accommodation consistently outperforms private alternatives across almost every metric in the report: satisfaction, social integration, sense of belonging, academic impact, and issue resolution. Students in university accommodation were more likely to feel their living situation positively affected their academic performance (71 per cent vs. 49 per cent for those in private student accommodation). This matters for how institutions think about widening participation, and it is consistent with the findings of my own research.
The financial picture is stark. 89 per cent of students had taken additional steps to cover accommodation costs, borrowing from family, working extra hours, or reducing energy use. 15 per cent found it genuinely difficult to meet costs. The report also finds that maintenance loans routinely fall short of actual rents. These are not individual financial management failures: they are systemic affordability pressures, and the OfS is right to document them.
Finally, the finding that 86 per cent of students said accommodation costs influenced their choice of where to study deserves serious regulatory attention. Student “choice” in the HE market cannot be meaningfully exercised if a foundational practical concern (where to live) is experienced as a constraint rather than an active decision.
Extending our understanding
Foundation Year courses represent an important and growing route into higher education. They enable students, often those who narrowly missed entry requirements, or who applied late in the cycle, to enter university at a high-tariff institution, develop academic skills and confidence, and progress to an undergraduate degree. The Foundation Year Network has extensively documented their contribution to widening participation. But the structural conditions under which many FY students are recruited (though this varies by provider) create specific and compounding disadvantages, disadvantages that the OfS accommodation report inadvertently illuminates.
My doctoral research examined FY students’ experiences at a high-tariff English university, using a mixed-methods design: a group-administered survey of 119 students, analysis of their administrative data, and 21 in-depth interviews. I explored how students come to be enrolled in Foundation Year courses and what their subsequent experiences are like.
The OfS and I are looking at different cohorts and operating at different levels. But the overlaps are striking, and the divergences instructive.
On information and decision-making: both studies show that students rely on university services and informal networks for information, and that those entering late in the admissions cycle, whether via FY changed offers, UCAS Extra, or Clearing, face compounded disadvantages. The OfS documents this at the point of accommodation search. My research shows it more fundamentally at the point of late course acceptance.
On belonging and social integration: the OfS finds that accommodation is central to friendship formation, sense of belonging, and positive academic outcomes, with 75 per cent of students reporting accommodation had a positive impact on their social lives. My research independently confirms this but adds that for FY students, most of whom are recruited late in the application cycle, on-campus accommodation was both especially important and especially hard to access.
Students who arrived after A-level results were confirmed frequently found that on-campus places had already been allocated to students who had held offers since January. Being housed off campus left them feeling disconnected from peer networks, support services, and the developing student community. There is every reason to think the same applies to students entering via UCAS Extra or Clearing more broadly.
On financial pressures: the OfS documents widespread financial strain. My research situates this within a particularly acute structural problem for FY students: they accrue four years of non-cancellable tuition fee debt rather than three, often combined with significant living costs, yet frequently did not fully understand this financial commitment at the point of accepting their offer. One participant told me she had not thought about the fees until she arrived: “When I got here, I was like, oh, wow, that’s actually four years of debt.” This was not an unusual finding in my data.
Where the report falls short
The OfS report’s core limitation is not methodological; it is one of scope. The study focuses on accommodation choice as a decision students make. But for students recruited late in the admissions cycle, the more fundamental problem is that they were never meaningfully able to choose at all.
70 per cent of survey respondents in my study entered the Foundation Year via a “change of offer at confirmation”. They were redirected after their A-level results, in the final weeks of August, after the main admissions cycle had closed. These students did not choose the Foundation Year in any meaningful sense.
Many had applied for undergraduate courses, missed subject-specific grade requirements, and were offered a FY place by their first-choice university as an alternative, often within days of results release. They accepted because the alternative was Clearing, because they wanted to attend that university, and because they had limited information about what a Foundation Year was, what it would cost, or how it would affect their access to on-campus accommodation and social integration.
The same logic applies, with appropriate variation, to all students entering via UCAS Extra or Clearing into undergraduate courses. The time pressure, the information deficit, the lack of independent guidance: these are structural features of a pre-qualification admissions system that has not been meaningfully reformed in decades, and their downstream consequences, including in accommodation, are precisely what the OfS report is documenting. My FY data makes this visible in sharp relief. But the pattern is not unique to FY students. It is a late-cycle phenomenon.
The OfS itself has acknowledged the unreformed UCAS system as a concern. The accommodation report demonstrates the downstream consequences of information inequality at scale. But it does not, and cannot, address the admissions-level mechanisms producing it.
The students most likely to enter higher education via these late-cycle routes are disproportionately those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, first-generation students, and those from minoritised ethnic communities. These are also the students most dependent on on-campus accommodation for social integration, and least likely to have family networks who can help them navigate unfamiliar systems. The OfS report confirms that parental HE experience predicts better outcomes across almost every accommodation metric it measures. My research shows the same pattern operating at the point of admissions. This is not coincidence: it is the same structural inequality, encountered twice.
Late-cycle recruitment and the stakes ahead
The context in which these findings land matters. The UK HE sector is entering a period of significant demographic and financial pressure. Declining domestic applicant numbers in some subject areas, alongside ongoing constraints on international recruitment, are pushing institutions to recruit further into the admissions cycle, holding offers longer, expanding Clearing activity, and in some cases growing FY provision specifically to manage the risk of late-stage shortfalls.
This means more students will be recruited late in the cycle, not fewer. The structural problems my research identifies in FY admissions (time pressure, information deficits, constrained accommodation access, limited independent guidance) are not niche concerns. They are a preview of what late-cycle recruitment produces at scale, under growing institutional pressure to fill places.
If widening participation is a genuine regulatory priority, the conditions under which late-cycle students are recruited cannot remain unexamined. The OfS accommodation report documents the symptoms. My research identifies the mechanism. Both point to the same conclusion: the admissions system itself must be in scope.
What this means
The OfS accommodation report is a valuable contribution to the evidence base, and I hope it shapes regulatory action. But if the regulator is serious about equality of opportunity in student accommodation, it needs to look beyond the accommodation system itself.
Three things follow from placing this report alongside research on FY and other late-cycle entrants:
- Universities should be required to reserve on-campus accommodation for students recruited late in the admissions cycle, including FY students who receive changed offers at confirmation, and those entering via UCAS Extra or Clearing. The evidence from both the OfS report and my own research is unambiguous: on-campus living supports belonging, integration, and academic engagement. Students who need it most are currently least likely to access it.
- The forthcoming DfE review of HE admissions must address late-cycle recruitment specifically. Foundation Year courses provide an excellent alternative route into higher education, but students should not be accepting course offers, whether for FY or undergraduate programmes, under conditions of acute time pressure and inadequate information. Independent guidance at the point of confirmation and Clearing must be strengthened, for all students, not just those entering FY routes.
- The National Student Survey should be extended to cover Foundation Year courses. The OfS cannot regulate what it cannot measure. FY students, a growing population now numbering in the tens of thousands, remain entirely outside the NSS framework. This is a regulatory gap the OfS is well-placed to close. Until it is closed, the sector cannot have a full picture of how late-cycle recruitment shapes student experience.
The OfS accommodation report shows that where students live shapes who they become at university. My research shows that for Foundation Year students, and, I would argue, for all students recruited late in the application cycle, the conditions determining that are set not by accommodation policy, but by admissions practice.
The two are not separate problems. They are the same problem, encountered at different points in the same journey. Both need to change.
