By now you’ll have read the news that the Office for Students is imposing two conditions of registration on the University of Northampton, following an investigation that took place between January and July in 2023.
This means that the OfS’ regulatory decision was delivered after students who were being taught in that time-period have finished their studies.
While I accept that our computing provision at that time may not have been meeting the high standards we set for ourselves as a university, the subsequent actions by the OfS have been remarkably challenging to decipher and respond to.
Addressing student needs
The most difficult thing to reconcile is the length of time this investigation and decision took to complete. A report that has been issued criticising course provision from three years ago serves no purpose. If the OfS really wants to be able to improve institutions and provide greater transparency for potential students, then the timescales need to be dramatically reduced.
If the OfS identifies issues with a course, students should have confidence in their regulator that these can be addressed within their time at university. The current system doesn’t work for students as they are long-gone before an investigation is concluded and the results shared publicly.
If anything is true, it’s that the investigation has been more of a distraction than a help for us to improve our offer. As a responsible provider, we are always striving to ensure we can deliver excellence and improve our provision. But the actions taken by the OfS hasn’t aided us in this.
Higher education is a critical juncture. Students are looking for clear value for money when they start their studies, and our operating environment is becoming more and more difficult to navigate. A regulator that is rooted in serving the best interests of students through timely interventions, and is fair to institutions, is what we all need if we are to continue serving the communities we operate in, having a meaningful social impact, and contributing to a thriving economy.
I don’t believe that there is anyone in the OfS who doesn’t share those goals. But the current system isn’t helping us get there, it’s holding us back from having the greatest possible impact.
Continuous improvement
Since the 2023 visit, the university, faculty, and course have all changed leadership. There has been over half a million pounds of investment. New labs have been set up, there is greater scrutiny of student support, changes in assessment practice have taken place – among a whole host of other actions. There is no area of our computing provision that has not been scrutinised and significantly improved.
That doesn’t mean we, as I imagine like many others, don’t have more work to do. But my point here is all of these changes have been communicated to OfS – and it has taken several months for them to come back to us on each occasion.
At this point in time, my team and I remain unclear what exactly the OfS needs from us to address their concerns in full. I’m confident that we probably have much of this evidence already: we just need to have a more constructive dialogue on a more professional timescale so we can pass on the relevant information.
To make the process more effective and ensure it works for everyone, the rules of the game need to be clearly set out in advance. That should include details of the data required, and what institutions will be judged against, throughout the investigation. And there should be clear timescales, that are much reduced from what we have just experienced, for every aspect of the investigative and regulatory process.
Throughout this investigation, we have engaged positively and with a clear focus on the delivery of our teaching and learning experience for our students.
The course and wider team have been exceptional at responding to the challenges faced, but I struggle to explain to them why they are being judged on events that happened three years ago.
A taste of your own medicine?
I’m not sure how it works at your university, but what you describe could be used almost word for word for the interaction between my department and “the centre”.
We get these sort of comments often. There isn’t an easy solution to this problem. The official data your ‘centre’ is using probably is not current . For GoS it refers to students who left 2 years ago. For continuation it is what happened at least a year ago. For NSS it refers to student experiences last academic year, etc. But the ‘centre’ will correctly note that the delays are the result of a number of (necessary) external processes. If your department is proactive you can respond to (monitoring based) concerns by analysing the current (unchecked) internal data that is available to you. I don’t think it is unreasonable for the ‘centre’ to raise concerns about, e.g. continuation red flags, even if the data is a year old.
A regulatory process this glacial is not fit for purpose. Investigation started January 2023 and takes six months, concluding June 2023. Report not published until a whole year later, July 2024 (why?). Back and forth with the University taking nearly two years before leading to a further report, at which the OfS finally decides it is taking action (as if the University wasn’t already responding to the earlier report).
A comparable process is an old-style internal Periodic Review, or an assurance report for a new validated partner. If such reports took more than 12 months end-to-end, something was seriously wrong.
And all this on the back of data that is eons old – the latest data the original investigation team had access to was for 2019-20 graduates, in a 4-year dataset. 10 years have passed since the first set of students that data referred to. TEN YEARS. If there was a problem – and I’m not saying there wasn’t – that’s a whole load of students who are being let down by their regulator.
Setting aside the substance of the investigation, the timelines alone demonstrate a regulator not fit for purpose. This is of such longstanding (http://lefttomyowndevices.blog/2026/02/16/here/) that the idea that (yet another) reset will address this type of issue simply isn’t credible.
To be fair, the OfS are working under extremely difficult conditions in terms of staffing.
Wait what’s that? They have *400* staff members? Including a “free speech tsar” on over 100k a year who seems to do nothing other than occasionally go on podcasts and make self contradictory statements?
If we are talking number of staff and salaries….
The University of Northampton has 2583 staff members (1428 FTE) and the vice-chancellor has a basic salary of £231,000 (these are 2024/25 numbers).
490 according to their latest data. Wow. I had no idea it was that many, as every interaction I have with them seemed to speak to a lack of resource. That makes the timescales really quite lamentable.