Size and shape dashboards, 2025
David Kernohan is Deputy Editor of Wonkhe
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The most exciting thing about the Office for Students’ size and shape dashboard release is the chance to experience the sector’s most up to date information on partnership and validated provision.
It is by no means as comprehensive as the data we got last month, but we are here looking at 2023-24 data rather than the state of play in 2022. But what we gain in recency we lose in detail – there’s no fancy mapping of franchisers to franchisees here.
In 2023-24 the largest users of full-time partnership delivery were Canterbury Christ Church University and Bath Spa University, both registering more than 10,000 students that are taught elsewhere. Oxford Brookes University was the only other with more than 5,000 subcontracted out (and the majority of these started courses in 2023-24).
If you want to dive more deeply into expansion and contraction, I have a dashboard that lets you look at the same data on a single provider basis for the four years of available data.
While policy attention may be focused on franchise provision, the data also gives us an in-depth look at student characteristics – showing entrants, qualifiers, and all students across characteristics ranging from age to disability, and from deprivation to sexual orientation. Not all of it is great quality (there are a lot of unknowns for socio-economic background, for example) and the choice of levels of study is very limited.
If you are interested primarily in levels of study the oddly named “size and shape” dataset is the one for you – showing student numbers by mode and ten different levels of study (including, as a portent for future datasets perhaps) “credit or modules,” which here primarily refers to what apprentices are doing.
Unlike with other OfS datasets, which have clear links to regulatory activity, it has never been entirely clear who the “size and shape” dashboards are for or what the provision of these particular splits of data allow us to do that other releases (including the venerable HESA student release, which is where you might expect to find this kind of information) do not. The best answer I can offer is the franchise thing, and even that appears to now be superseded by the detailed information devoted to partnerships and franchising recently released.
There are some interesting things in the data that illustrate just how much the sector has changed over the last few years e.g. the biggest provider of full-time undergraduate courses in England is now Global Banking School Limited, which grew by 35% in 2023/24.
All the universities need to do to sell more efficiently at scale is to narrow the product range and standardise the offerings by eliminating variations in quality, that is the ideological message from the previous government using the analogy of statistical process control, enshrined in the Higher Education and Research Act, 2017 and made manifest by the Quality Assurance Agency and the Office for Students: commodification. Skills training in the professions and courses which can be taught from textbooks will be the easiest to commodify.
What we really need to know are the number of students for each qualification for each subcontractor. The purpose of the data is to record the expansion of a market for higher level skills training under the rubric of higher education, normally provided by further education colleges.. It shows the successful operation of a centralised financial model for the production of qualifications at scale using variations of core subjects with minimal investment costs for the product range. I expect textbook-based business courses will dominate provision and a few public sector occupations, where specialisation can be narrowed efficiently. Those which have… Read more »