Finding 2024–25 delivery partnerships

In October of last year, the Office for Students released a dataset that many of us had been asking for for a long time.

It concerned what should be, on the face of it a simple question – where are students being taught and on whose behalf? The explosion of franchise and partnership activity had thus far been seen only obliquely: unexpectedly smaller universities became huge.

The data was limited (apparently necessarily) to activity before 2023, but included information on where students had failed to continue, complete, or progress. The B conditions were interesting – and bolstered the growing case that something has been going very wrong with franchising. But the real interest in the data was more prurient – who was hopping into relationships with who, and to what extent?

A welcome addition

Alongside today’s usually uninteresting (to those who have already been over the HESA Student data for this year) “size and shape” release we got an update on the sheer scale of franchising. It is perhaps best understood as a marketplace, with agreements being made and remade as registering providers balance cost, reputation and income.

You’ll look in vain for this information on the OfS dashboards. The data is only published by individual registering institution, one file for each – and you can only get it by downloading a sector’s worth of files. You would think that given the current level of policy interest that the regulator would make some attempt to present (or even to draw attention to the existence of) this data.

So here is a nice way to look at all those spreadsheets, allowing you to examine the behavior of individual registering providers.

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Although often when we think of academic partnerships our mind often goes to the (often problematic) large scale operations, much of this activity extends over a longer time and is focused locally or on specific strategic relationships. Often geography or specialisms are reasons to enter into relationships with other providers. And we can also see relationships with schools (teacher training), hospital trusts (healthcare), and local bodies (police, social work, local government) within this data – even though the registering partner may not always be the nearest university.

This is a partial map, showing most larger relationships over time (there is a limit to the hours that even I will spend looking up geographic data for small security companies that had a degree apprenticeship offer in 2022). But it does offer another lens on a complex and misunderstood area of higher education.

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Regulation in action

Of course, the time is coming when larger (300+ student) partnership providers will need to register with the Office for Students in order to continue delivering higher education. Here’s a quick list of those who are delivering to more than 300 students, showing the registration details that I am easily able to derive from UKPRNs.

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The cut-off date is midnight on 30 June, with a decision point at September 2027 if you want to keep delivering at that scale from 2028-29.