OfS sets aside £660k to pay Sussex costs

The 2025-26 OfS Annual Report and Accounts reveal that the regulator put aside £660,000 to cover legal costs incurred by the University of Sussex. To be clear, this is a provision, not necessarily the actual amount payable.

Readers may wish to reflect that this amount is significantly higher than the £585,000 fine originally levied by OfS on Sussex.

Coming attractions

The other headlines we largely already knew. The second phase of the megaTEF consultations will kick off in the autumn, and we are pending further work on student rights (with the C6 consultation having closed on 9 July). Last year saw 12 referrals to national trading standards, so there’s clearly work to be done! There’s also further expansion of dental places coming for 2027–28 and the £80m funding competition linked to the defence sector.

Likewise, the continued focus on financial stability is both expected and welcome – at the end of the 24–25 financial year there were 108 providers with a formal monitoring arrangement, up from 71 at the start of the cycle. Six providers currently have student protection directions in place – and a new Financial Sustainability Advisory Panel brings the sector voice more closely into the regulatory response. OfS met with the chairs and accountable officers of around (around?) 15 providers assessed as presenting the highest risk.

Slightly further afield work has been ongoing with sector representatives on the development of a model student contract, and on a statement of expectations for providers on supporting disabled students. The free speech legal duties come into force in April 2027, and there is a lot of work to do there given the kicking OfS got in the Sussex judgement. OfS remains keen to support regional access partnerships, so we can confidently expect more work there.

Consultations to look forward to (outside of the quality one already mentioned) include on governance (across a suite of E conditions), and most likely finessing the arrangements for collecting and calculating the international student levy. And we’ll also get an update on strengthening Prevent monitoring later this year.

Running the OfS

The regulator takes pains to remind us that registration fees are equivalent to 0.1 per cent of the available income from OfS. In slightly more helpful terms, fees are almost exactly equivalent to £32.5m. While that is a lot of money, it is apparently not enough to run a regulator, so DfE chips in another £16.7m (which, for accounting reasons, is not classified as income). If we are doing equivalences, £16.7m is equivalent to 0.63 HEFCEs.

What does OfS spend about £50m on each year? As you might expect, the majority of this is staff costs (£41m) – covering 523 FTE staff (553 headcount). The median salary for 2025-26 was £56,029 – staff received a flat rate uplift of 5 per cent, plus an average non-consolidated bonus of £845, at the last pay round.

We do usually get some details from the OfS’ annual staff survey in these things (they also ran a new “pulse” survey) – this year we don’t get the detail, but we do get fascinating details of new OfS staff awards linked to the four “attitudes” set out in the strategy: collaborative, ambitious, vigilant, and vocal.

Turning to governance, we learn that the Provider Risk Committee (a name that we usually see next to the words “report” and “redacted” in the OfS board paper releases) is no more: regulatory decisions are now made directly by the executive in line with policy agreed by the board and using the revised scheme of delegation. This makes for faster outcomes for providers.

What else?

The bulk of the report covers activities linked to the three OfS areas of focus from the strategy: quality, student experience and support, and sector resilience.

Quality

On quality, we learn that at the end of the 2025-26 financial year there were 52 registration cases in progress – including 43 applications, seven change of category applications, and two change of entity applications. But what we notably do not learn is the number of quality and standards investigations currently underway – something which has been reported on in the past. Are we to assume the number is zero?

Given that Lifelong Learning Entitlement courses will start in January 2027 (and are open for applications from September 2026) you would perhaps hope that some progress had been made on how the quality and standards of such courses would be regulated. OfS notes that:

“Our condition B3 currently uses indicators that cannot be applied to the study of modules. We are therefore developing new indicators, starting with a module completion measure

These will appear in future TEFs, so keep an eye out for the line in the consultation, but it does feel a little late in the day to be pulling this together: currently providers are marketing courses without any idea how these courses will be regulated. Likewise, a little more activity on student provider transfer arrangements would be welcome – the statutory requirement to report annually on this is a passing note that 1.5 per cent of students moved to a different provider within a year of starting their course in 2024-25.

Finally, whatever happened to the review of applicant information? No information on when that will be published, but non-specified “improvements” to Discover Uni (which is a course comparison site funded by the government and run by OfS) are noted.

Student experience and support

A note on the weekend delivery student loans issue (which affected around 22,000 students), notes that OfS expect providers to offer appropriate refunds and compensation. Whether LLE modules will be permitted weekend delivery is not stated, but feels like an important point to consider.

OfS assessed and approved 47 access and participation plans for 2026-27, and 22 variation requests for existing plans.

Sector resilience

The headline numbers are noted above – we can add to them seven audits of 2023-24 student data , with another five currently underway facilitated by an increase in audit capacity. OfS also conducted detailed financial reviews of 12 selected providers.

The information that OfS holds on sector finances has been improved by interim data collections held in spring and autumn 2025 – we are not told in the report whether these very useful additional collections will continue on a regular cycle.

This section also features a sustainability report, which for some reason, only deals with the OfS’ own environmental footprint. There are some laudable actions and encouraging reporting there (and the disquieting news that OfS used a record 1,157 reams of A4 paper during 2025-26), but there is still no oversight of the sustainability or environmental impact of the higher education sector, and has not been for the nine years of OfS’ existence.