Another provider loses access to the loan book. Should students have been warned?

It says that prospective students will not be able to access student finance from the Student Loans Company (SLC) to study there, and existing students – who are currently on a term break – will need to transfer to a different provider to continue to access student finance.

The decision impacts around 250 students currently studying for a Pearson Higher National qualification at the college, who will no longer be able to complete their courses there.

In 2023-24, SLC figures describe 890 students pulling down £10,848,686 in maintenance loans and 866 students pulling down £4,938,922 in tuition fee loans.

In these circumstances, OfS says that Pearson is supporting the college to ensure students have good information, advice and guidance about their options for continuing their studies, as well as support for their wellbeing.

Familiar DETails

If that story sounds familiar, that’s because arguably, it is. As well as its HNDs in Business, Hospitality, Health and Social Care, Computing and Leadership and Management (all awarded by Pearson), the college was also delivering the City & Guilds L5 Diploma in Education and Training (DET) prior to last September 2024.

Last October you may recall that Ofsted published findings about FE teacher training at several private colleges that also offered higher education – and one of them was BRIT.

In a response to its “Big Listen” exercise, it described a system where trainees were “not being prepared for their teaching careers” and providers were “wasting trainees’ time, draining public money, and failing to build the pipeline of FE and skills teachers that the sector needs.”

The inspections, commissioned by the Department for Education after awareness that something was awry in the largely unregulated FES ITE sector, found institutions where trainee teachers were completing their teaching in restaurants rather than educational settings, staff were drawing on outdated theories, and basic safeguarding requirements were being ignored.

My colleague Michael Salmon pointed out at the time a potentially problematic disconnect – all five remained on the Office for Students register, with some even displaying TEF silver awards on their websites while simultaneously failing to meet basic teaching standards in their teacher training provision.

You may be more familiar with the Applied Business Academy – which collapsed after the Department for Education (DfE) “de-designated” it for student finance. An OfS investigation later revealed that the provider had also failed to deliver its Diploma in Education and Training (DET) course to an acceptable standard, with evidence of falsified or unsuitable student placements, unqualified mentors and assessors, duplicated observation records, and an almost total absence of academic oversight.

Not a single student was awarded the qualification, and the awarding body, City & Guilds, concluded that no student work submitted met the minimum requirements for certification.

Just like ABA, BRIT was on the Office for Students register. OfS says that it has been engaging with Brit College in relation to compliance with its ongoing conditions of registration, and we knew it was subject to an OfS investigation back in January – an investigation which apparently remains ongoing.

We don’t know whether interim findings have led to DfE pulling the funding plug. We don’t know if Brit has been subject to any formal conditions of registration. And while OfS says that this will be “upsetting news” for students at Brit College, we can’t assess the extent to which students now impacted should be furious that they weren’t warned.

The inspectors called

The Ofsted report for BRIT over its DET provision back in 2023 – when it had 1,178 trainees enrolled on ITE programmes – found that leaders were not planning or delivering a curriculum that reflected the realities of teaching in FE. Trainees were ill-prepared for key responsibilities, especially around meeting the needs of learners with SEND, and were not taught how to deliver their chosen subjects effectively.

There were no subject-specific sessions or tailored mentor guidance, and many trainees completed placements in inappropriate settings like restaurants and businesses, not in actual FES contexts. Some never completed the required 100 teaching hours.

Trainees often wrote theoretical assignments without having had the opportunity to apply learning in a real teaching environment (due to delays or failures in securing placements), most mentors completed observation forms without offering meaningful feedback or support on teaching improvement, and leaders failed to carry out essential checks (e.g. DBS clearance) to ensure trainees were suitable to work with learners – placing both trainees and students at potential risk.

You can see how that might have led to it no longer providing the DET. What we don’t know is what has specifically led to it being de-designated for the L5s in Business, Heath etc, and if there were similar problems then, why it’s taken another whole year to get to any conclusions.

Just as in the ABA case, I can also make an argument that it’s very odd that OfS is making the announcement of what it is clearly signalling is a DfE decision.

We do know that just over a decade ago, the QAA found that the college lacked a systematic process for reviewing programmes annually, undermining its ability to reflect on performance, address student concerns, or use achievement data for enhancement.

That report said that while staff had industry experience, few were appropriately qualified for higher education teaching. It said that library resources were minimal, book stock was outdated, there were no journal subscriptions, and internet access was unreliable. Students considered resources “barely adequate”.

The virtual learning environment functioned only as a static repository. Interactive use was not developed, plagiarism-detection software wasn’t consistently used, students received no programme-specific handbooks, students couldn’t be issued email addresses, and the system was vulnerable to security threats and viruses.

There were QAA follow ups that showed some progress – but in 2019, for example, when it was offering a BA (Hons) Business and Management (Top-up) programme in partnership with the University of Northampton, the QAA again found a host of problems.

Retention was down at 61 per cent, pass rates at first attempt were just 44 per cent (cohort 1) and 13 per cent (cohort 2), students were unprepared for level 6 study and struggled to meet academic demands, parts of the website dated back to 2014 or 2017, its “Agents Policy” was not being fully implemented, and staff were only just beginning training on the new Quality Code.

The partnership with Northampton appears to have ceased shortly afterwards – and of course, given the regulatory system we now have, the inspection/review oversight trail on its remaining HE provision goes cold there too.

Well designed courses and a high-quality experience

The OfS registration thing matters partly because being on the register is the current mooted solution to the franchising “problem”. It matters because of what OfS itself says about what ongoing registration means. But mostly it matters because of the way providers themselves brandish the meaning. On its website as I type, Brit says:

Being registered means a higher education provider has demonstrated to the OfS that it:

• provides well-designed courses that deliver a high-quality academic experience for all students
• ensures students’ outcomes are valued by employers or enable further study
• awards qualifications that hold their value over time, in line with recognised standards.
• pays regard to guidance about how to comply with consumer protection law.
• has a published student protection plan setting out the risks of course, campus or provider closure and how it will protect students’ interests in such an event.
• has the financial resources to provide and deliver the courses advertised
• has the management and governance arrangements necessary to provide and deliver the courses advertised.

In the absence of any public conclusion to the contrary from OfS, and no public comment from DfE, students who are now left in the lurch will rightly be wondering who knew what and when. If its courses are being de-designated over quality, what value do the quals hold now even if students can obtain them?

Clearly no inspection or quality regime is ever going to be “live”. The food safety sign in your local chippy is only ever as accurate as things were when the council were there, and as up to date as when the inspection was carried out.

But for this group of students – and thousands like them – the regulatory assurances are bigger and broader, while the granularity and recent-ness of an actual look at the provision are much weaker. If students aren’t to know, they might ask how well risk-based regulation is really working on their behalf.

Hiding in plain sight

I say there’s much we don’t know. But one astonishing thing I would add is the level of honesty in the published Student Protection Plan – students reading the 2024–25 version (dated March 2024) would surely have been alarmed by the scale and seriousness of the risks disclosed.

It admits the DET issue, acknowledges that it faces a “high risk of losing its registration with OfS” (following quality assurance concerns raised by City and Guilds), and admits that the situation has attracted the attention of DfE, jeopardising the institution’s financial viability altogether. That surely is material information that needed to be signalled to students under the DMCC Act’s provisions on unfair commercial practices. If nothing else, OfS only announced an investigation in January and said one had started in November 2024 – the plan is dated March 2024.

The prospect of institutional closure is treated in the Plan not as remote, but as increasingly probable. It admits that permanent closure is now a “high” risk and that the only thing preventing it is continued access to OfS registration and student loan funding, it acknowledges that it may soon be forced to cease operations entirely, and that closure planning is “already underway”.

It even makes clear that transferring students to other institutions would be “increasingly difficult”, particularly given the closure of many similar providers and differences in course structure, delivery modes, and optional units. For Pearson HND students, it was relying on emergency approvals, new memorandums of understanding, and case-by-case transfer support to avoid disruption. Under the DMCC framework, those risks are plainly relevant to a student’s decision to enter into a contract with the College.

Perhaps most damning is the indication that student complaints had already reached the OIA, and that the issues involved raise “systemic concerns” about the quality and integrity of provision – problems not limited to a single programme or cohort, but institution-wide. Under DMCC, these concerns – and the risk of regulatory sanctions – would clearly fall within the scope of information that must be disclosed before enrolment. Concealing such risks, or failing to present them prominently, could be deemed a misleading omission under the Act.

Maybe this was all signalled to students entering in 2024. But if not, they might reasonably ask why it wasn’t. And if the College now collapses and they have the legal right to compensation, they might ask why the lack of a special administration regime for colleges will put them to the back of the queue.