An office that bears students’ name ought to be acting in their interests

It’s the National Student Survey (NSS) press releases for me.

In 2019, the Office for Students (OfS) noted that there was “still work for universities and colleges to do” to ensure that students are provided with clear marking criteria and constructive feedback. No discernable action ensued.

In 2020, it noted that part-time students have “strikingly low agreement rates” with questions concerning learning community and student voice. It then abolished the question on community, and it’s not clear that it did anything on voice – for part- or full-time students.

When, in 2022, it found that only 65 per cent (compared with 64 per cent in 2021) agreed their course was well organised and running smoothly, you’d have thought that its promised already long-delayed work on students as consumers would be accelerated. In 2026, we’re still waiting.

A postgraduate NSS has never arrived. Analysis of the free text comments has been promised, and never delivered.

Or take complaints. Ossian Elkington’s article elsewhere on the site finds that student complaints intelligence reaches OfS and then… who knows.

There is apparently no dedicated mechanism for capturing it, no aggregated reporting product for senior management or the board, and no auditable record of the annual meetings the collaboration agreement with the OIA requires.

It is, for me, a symptom of something deeper in how OfS has designed, or more accurately failed to design, its role as a regulator that puts students at the centre.

Engagement

The UK Regulators Network’s consumer engagement framework distinguishes between policy architecture commitments – things a regulator says it will do – and operational intelligence products, the mechanisms that make those commitments real.

Across UK economic regulation, the better examples share a common feature – consumer intelligence is treated as a product with a defined internal life, not just something that enters the building.

The FCA is the most formally developed model. It operates a statutory panel architecture that includes a dedicated Financial Services Consumer Panel, explicitly framed as independent advice and challenge against the FCA’s statutory duties and objectives.

It expects to be involved before policy positions are formed rather than asked to respond once they are. And it commissions research to stimulate debate and influence policy in areas where there are risks to consumers that are not being addressed, or gaps in understanding of the consumer experience of financial services.

Ofcom’s Communications Consumer Panel operates on similar principles, with an explicit remit to bring consumer, citizen and small business perspectives into policy through research and advice.

It publishes a library of research outputs – on pricing, switching behaviour, consumer vulnerability, accessibility – that functions as a standing evidence base rather than an episodic intervention.

Ofcom separately publishes a pricing and consumer engagement report as a regular output, treating consumer experience data as something to be reported on systematically rather than surfaced only when needed for a specific policy decision.

Ofgem’s Consumer First Panel goes further in one respect that is directly relevant here – it is designed as a repeatable cross-policy mechanism, drawing on the same cohort of everyday energy customers across multiple issues over the course of a year.

It allows the regulator to test trade-offs, track how consumer attitudes shift in response to market changes, and build an evidence base that outlasts any single consultation. The panel has been used on affordability, price cap design, supplier support, and information needs.

The relevant comparison for OfS is whether the intelligence flowing from student experience is being treated with anything approaching the rigour these regulators bring to consumer data. On the evidence available, the honest answer is no.

Rights

The UK Regulators Network’s second test is different and in some ways more basic – can the people the regulator exists to protect actually understand what they are entitled to, and what to do when things go wrong?

The CAA’s guidance on passenger rights is scenario-based and operational – what happens if your flight is delayed by two hours, by three hours, by five; what you are owed in care and assistance while you wait; what compensation you can claim on arrival; what to keep (receipts for reasonable expenses) and where to take a complaint if the airline refuses.

The guidance makes clear what the legal entitlement is, when it applies, what limits exist, and what the next step is. It is written for someone standing in an airport at eleven at night, not for someone studying consumer law.

The ICO treats rights explanation as core infrastructure. Its guidance is organised by the rights themselves – access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, objection – with each right explained in terms of what it covers, when it applies, what exceptions exist, and what the individual should do to exercise it.

Importantly, the same framework serves both individuals asserting rights and organisations building compliant processes, which means the guidance does double duty – it informs the person making a request and the provider handling it.

The ORR’s “know your rail rights” content is navigational in a similar way – organised around what commonly goes wrong (delays, cancellations, being refused a refund) rather than around regulatory architecture. It states compensation eligibility clearly, including the important point that passengers may be entitled to compensation regardless of the reason for the delay, which removes a common source of confusion that operators sometimes exploit. There is a dedicated compensation page that spells out the calculation rather than deferring to individual train operator schemes.

The CQC’s handling of complaint rights is also worth noting. Its guidance explicitly states that people have a right to complain and that services are legally required to have a complaints procedure – Regulation 16 of the Health and Social Care Act sets out what providers must have in place to receive and act on complaints, and the CQC publishes guidance on what that means in practice.

OfS polling finds that over three-quarters of students said promises had not been fully met, just 32 per cent of students felt well informed about their right to fair and transparent assessment, and more than half (52 per cent) said they felt not that well informed or not at all informed about their right to receive compensation. On a call on consumer rights in January, it couldn’t even answer a question on strike compensation.

Behan’s recommendations

David Behan’s independent review, published in 2024, made a series of directly relevant recommendations – and the gap between recommendation and implementation varies considerably across the list.

He recommended involving students directly in investigations – not just as a source of data but as participants in the regulatory process itself, with a direct line of sight into how evidence is gathered and assessed. No news on that.

He recommended exploring a model that would make the contractual relationship between students and providers concrete – setting out students’ rights and obligations as consumers alongside what providers are required to deliver. We’re still waiting.

He pointed to what he described as a “cautious and risk-averse” approach to regulation – OfS failing to intervene in situations where regulatory action could make a positive difference, linked to a fear of litigation.

It took a long time to get partnership data out of OfS, and when we did there was a subset of provision where 77 per cent of FT FD students continued into a second year, compared to 88 per cent in the sector as a whole, and 70 per cent of students completed their course, compared to 87 per cent for the sector as a whole.

Has any action been taken, or investigations launched? Who knows.

What needs to change

The Student Interest Board can only feed student perspectives into regulatory decisions if those decisions are themselves informed by what students are experiencing. A model student contract can only clarify rights that students can realistically assert. And a risk-based regulatory model can only direct attention proportionately if the intelligence that informs it is being systematically captured, processed and carried to decision-makers.

The comparators suggest what that would look like in practice – a defined intake mechanism for student intelligence, routine coding and aggregation, synthesis for senior oversight, and an auditable trail showing how the intelligence affected monitoring, strategy and prioritisation decisions.

As provider finances started to worsen, a student interests regulator might have clocked that students might suffer. April 2025 polling found that 83 per cent thought that cost-cutting measures had changed the experience they felt they’d been promised – often through larger class sizes than expected, greater use of online learning, or reduced access to academic resources and student support.

There wasn’t a response when it got the results last May, and its response when the polling was published in January was to repeat a set of vague principles, including a commitment to “not undermining institutions that are making difficult decisions as part of their transformation”.

An office that bears their name ought to be interested in students’ experiences, have their interests at heart, and be demonstrably acting on those interests when they’re not met. It has a long way to go.