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It’s to free up resources to focus on financial sustainability, apparently.
This closure will affect currently live and planned future applications for registration, for university title (including name changes), and for degree awarding powers (DAPs) – with those with requests already in the system currently being told that all applications are “paused” until August 2025.
This means that no provider will be able to join, or change status on, the register – putting providers with existing plans (however far advanced) to join the register, change name, or seek degree awarding powers at a significant disadvantage as they plan for the year ahead.
OfS says these temporary restrictions:
will allow the OfS to work more closely with institutions under significant financial pressure in order to protect the interests of students
The regulator has already expanded capacity in assessing financial sustainability by appointing financial consultants on 12 month contracts, and works with both KPMG and PriceWaterhouseCoopers on provider financial assessments (two contracts, both valued at £80,000, for three months between 1 November and 31 January). It has received extra funding from the Department for Education to carry out this work.
Director for Regulation Phillipa Pickford said:
While we do not expect significant numbers of institutions to close in the immediate future, acting now allows us to intervene effectively at an early stage. Delaying this work would mean we miss a crucial window of opportunity to get ahead of a worsening financial situation for some institutions.
We recognise that these temporary changes come at a cost. Our decisions will have a direct impact on a small number of institutions that have recently submitted an application for registration or degree awarding powers and will have those applications paused. It will also affect those that may be intending to apply. But we must prioritise managing risks for students already in the system, ahead of the benefits that new institutions, or institutions with the ability to award their own qualifications, bring.
There’s a strongly worded response from Independent HE:
This decision will make OfS itself directly responsible for putting the sustainability of some institutions at risk – and not because of poor planning or the overoptimistic forecasting of unrealistic growth trajectories. If government policy has created a situation where the regulator feels that it cannot do the essential job it was given by parliament, then government should intervene to fix it – not allow the costs of this failure to be paid by those who did nothing to earn it.
OfS took on additional responsibilities to assess providers against registration criteria and degree awarding powers criteria (initially carried out by the Designated Quality Body) following a breakdown in the relationship between OfS and the Quality Assurance Agency. Work such as this puts a premium on staff with deep knowledge of the sector and experience of working closely with providers – and similar skills are now in demand as OfS takes on a new responsibility for sector financial sustainability under a new interim chair and new set of ministers.
Whereas the news is a welcome signal that OfS is taking financial sustainability at a provider level very seriously and is actively involved with discussions and planning at providers around the sector, it will come as a disappointment to those hoping for a speedy decision on registration or degree awarding powers – two sets of decisions that could have a significant positive impact on provider recruitment and thus finances.
As of the most recent set of board papers, dated October 2024, OfS was dealing with a total of 13 quality and standards investigations ahead of registration, and had seen a further 15 applications for registration since May 2024. Three of these reports were close to being finalised. At the same point 23 applications for degree awarding powers were open. It’s not clear how many university title applications are currently open.
Current regulatory documentation puts the minimum time that an applicant might expect OfS to need to make a decision on registration at 41 weeks. Time scales are not available for the DAPs process, but it is notable that just one OfS assessment report has been published since it took on these responsibilities.
OfS has attempted to justify this decision via their understanding of section 3(5) of the Higher Education and Research Act 2017. The regulator claims that applications need to be submitted in the “specified manner” and has determined that this phrase will now mean “not in the period between 26 November 2024 and 1 August 2025”.