OfS wants to intervene more strongly on quality. Can it intervene more intelligently?

The Office for Students’ second-stage consultation on the future of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) proposes a significant change to how quality is regulated in English higher education.

These proposals were already trailed in the earlier consultation, and what we now have is a more integrated approach to assessing compliance with minimum educational standards which addresses some of the gap between previous B3 and TEF arrangements, stronger consequences for institutions delivering poor provision and more tangible rewards for those demonstrating higher quality. Taken together, these changes embed a significant shift from enhancement to compliance, and arguably at the expense of a focus on improvement.

TEF and the wider quality system have always had three somewhat contradictory goals. First, they were intended to assure minimum acceptable standards of student experience and outcomes. Second, TEF was intended to encourage quality enhancement, because higher ratings would affect student choice and institutional reputation. Third, as a largely paper-based rather than inspection-based exercise, TEF was designed to be less burdensome than other public sector quality systems. Having led two cycles of TEF assessment, our conclusion was that any two of these goals could be met, but meeting all three was extremely challenging. In this piece, we consider how far the new proposals resolve the challenges we struggled with.

Raising the bar or reconfiguring the pie

The underlying proposition of the stage two consultation sounds compelling, though it rests on the assumption that regulating more tightly through funding and recruitment restrictions will raise quality, and not merely redistribute income towards providers that already perform well. We agree that “students should receive high-quality teaching, academic support, rigorous assessment and appropriate resources”. We also agree that students must be protected from poor education and outcomes and that inadequate providers should not be allowed to expand unchecked. There is a strong public interest in directing student demand, and the public funding that follows it, towards high-quality provision.

To address these questions, the OfS proposals replace the TEF familiar from the 2018–2023 cycles with a common assessment process. All registered higher education providers would be assessed against minimum regulatory requirements, with nearly all assessed during an initial three-year cycle. Providers with sufficient data would decide in advance whether also to seek Gold, Silver or Bronze ratings for student experience and student outcomes. An initial risk assessment would determine whether enhanced scrutiny, potentially including a site visit, was needed.

The incentive to apply is intended to be strong. TEF ratings provide a route to government-determined tuition fee uplifts; OfS proposes that providers would normally need Silver or Gold in both aspects to be eligible to apply for or extend degree-awarding powers; and ratings could affect eligibility for public grant funding, though the criteria for this are deferred to a further consultation. Higher-rated providers would normally be assessed less often. This is a very significant shift for the TEF. OfS aims to solve the triple challenge of the 2018–2023 TEF by changing both its assessment methods and its tools.

Minimum-requirements assessment is distinguished from assessment for excellence within a common process. That separation is sensible, but it means that the burden goal is only partly addressed: every provider faces regular assessment, some face enhanced scrutiny and site visits, and those – surely the overwhelming majority with sufficient data – who opt in will need to provide additional evidence for TEF ratings. Financial and regulatory consequences become stronger levers for change alongside student choice and institutional reputation. Funding is only a stronger lever if providers’ finances depend on it, and it may reward those that already have strong metrics, who may not be the providers serving the most disadvantaged students. Providers with stronger widening participation missions may report weaker raw metrics, especially on student outcomes, although benchmarking and contextual evidence are intended to address this. Unsatisfactory providers face a more substantial assessment regime.

Some of these changes simply reflect the way the sector has changed since the inception of the TEF and the extent to which the challenges of 2026 are not those of 2018. The TEF undoubtedly sharpened institutions’ strategic focus on teaching quality and strengthened their use of data on student experience and outcomes. But the early assumption that it would drive student choice has not been convincingly borne out, and this helps explain the decision to sharpen the financial incentives in TEF. New providers have entered the sector since the 2017 Higher Education and Research Act, and while they have not done so in the numbers envisaged, more diverse delivery models pose new challenges for quality oversight. Finally, the rapid expansion of franchised provision has raised troubling questions about governance, oversight and accountability, highlighted by the National Audit Office’s 2024 investigation. These changes make a substantial overhaul of the TEF necessary.

The proposal that students taught through subcontracted arrangements should count fully towards the lead provider’s quality assessment and TEF ratings, with separate data to expose differences in performance, addresses an important accountability gap. Validated-only provision would be assessed separately, with possible restrictions on validation powers where quality is unsatisfactory.

Can’t get no satisfaction

The proposals nonetheless raise tough questions for institutions and the sector. The first concerns the cycle of assessments for satisfactory and unsatisfactory provision. For most providers, this will involve an evidence-based judgement drawing on a basket of metrics, context and assessor judgement, with enhanced assessment where needed. But providers with limited data proved a challenge for assessors in previous TEF cycles. OfS makes some sensible proposals here, including an initial assessment of risk and the grounds for an assessors’ site visit. However, we suspect the underlying data problems will not go away, especially for smaller providers.

The second concerns providers whose own indicators suggest they might receive Bronze or Requires improvement rather than a higher rating. On first analysis, these providers face a difficult choice about opting in. But declining a TEF rating does not avoid scrutiny or regulatory consequences: Satisfactory and Unsatisfactory outcomes carry consequences broadly equivalent to Bronze and Requires improvement respectively. Providers without ratings would also lack the route to tuition fee uplifts associated with TEF, while possible public grant funding criteria remain subject to further consultation.

The third concerns providers with relatively strong aggregate metrics. In our experience, such providers nonetheless have extensive internal variation in performance for some subjects, and often for disadvantaged groups of students. The proposals provide for disaggregated indicators, contextual evidence and student submissions, and are clear that submissions should focus on outcomes rather than policies or procedures, so higher-rated providers will need to be confident that their quality systems deliver for all students.

Fourth, whilst the proposals are robust for assessing institutions, they are less developed on how to support improvement across the sector. They include thematic reports, case studies, visits to explore good practice and recognition of demonstrable improvement, but these do not in themselves build institutional capability and improvement in experience and outcomes. Overall, the questions point to the same risk: the new model depends on data and outcomes that are hardest to measure for the providers where quality is most uncertain.

The new TEF proposals mark a significant change. In her review of the TEF in 2021, Shirley Pearce emphasised its enhancement purpose. These proposals shift decisively towards anchoring the TEF in regulation and compliance. That shift may be justified given the sector as it now exists, but enhancement and compliance can pull in different directions.

OfS is right to want to intervene more strongly in a sector facing significant challenge and change. The more demanding question is whether it can intervene more intelligently: targeting genuine risks, protecting educational opportunity and creating the conditions for sustained improvement. Our experience of earlier TEF cycles, and of recently working with institutions on quality, is that institutions need to understand their data systems, build their staff’s ability to use data to drive improvement, and focus systematically on outcomes for all students. OfS will succeed if it can drive that culture in institutions, so that the new regime protects access and exposes weak provision, rather than driving it out of sight.