The Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) is to close on 31 March 2025. The schools oversight end of things moves into the Department for Education regions directorate from the start of next month, with the remaining funding and assurance functions shifting into DfE the following spring.

Back in 2022 we noted the loss of ESFA policy functions, which moved into a then-new DfE tertiary education directorate (currently the skills directorate, led by Julia Kinniburgh)  that spans the full gamut of post-16 education and skills. This monster directorate has responsibilities including higher and further education strategy and policy, apprenticeships, student finance, and data analysis. It is also the sponsor directorate for the Office for Students and the Student Loans Company – it will likely take on sponsorship of Skills England when this new body arrives.

We see here the bones of the centralised end of our devolving skills system. Skills England takes on the data analysis, apprenticeship, and regional collaboration remits – backed by departmental funding and policy functions.

All of which makes the higher education end of what is increasingly thought of as a tertiary education sector feel rather anomalous. We already know that the focus of OfS going forward will be on “monitoring financial stability, ensuring quality, protecting public money, and regulating in the interests of students“. You’ll note that neither policy development nor funding feature in that list. Meanwhile the Student Loans Company has been retooling systems ahead of the launch of a Lifelong Learning Entitlement that has been conspicuous by its absence from ministerial statements – all the while no doubt expecting the shapely medium-term rethink of higher education finance that Jacqui Smith flashed at the Universities UK conference.

One is reminded, perhaps unhelpfully, of the three tests for the viability of non-departmental bodies current in the Jacob Rees Mogg era. A technical function (that needs external expertise to deliver), a need for political impartiality, or the independent establishment of facts and data. SLC has a fair case to make on point one, OfS will likely want to play about with the latter two – though as I have noted before it has not made the best case for political independence in recent years.

Just before we all messily contemplate the sad loss of our beloved regulator, it is worth reminding ourselves that ministers have promised a new permanent chair of OfS after David Behan’s interim stint. However, it might be worth giving thought to exactly what the organisation his successor will lead might be doing in a new tertiary landscape.