Sub-contractual providers need to register with OfS

Back at the top of the year, the Department for Education floated a proposal that larger (greater than 300 headcount) providers of franchise and partnership higher education needed to register with the Office for Students.

Nearly twelve months and 53 consultation proposals later, the department (and by extension, the Office for Students) is ready to crack on.

Yes, that is a very small number of responses for what is likely to be a huge change to the way higher education is regulated.

To quickly go through what’s on the table, if you are a provider of higher education that does not have its own degree awarding powers – outside of a slightly expanded group of public sector providers, most notably further education colleges, NHS trusts, and the local authorities and schools that administer a growing chunk of initial training – and you are intending to teach more than 300 (headcount) new students in a given year after 2028-29 you need to be OfS registered by September 2027. If you are not, you (and your students) will not be able to access public funds.

That’s the “course designation” process that got DfE in a tangle with the Oxford Business School case – for some time designation has been automatic for pretty much any provision delivered on behalf of a registered provider, something that has arguably led to a lot of problems. For the first time, there are controls on designation, albeit only over the 300 limit.

How do we count to 300? Perhaps wisely this will not be a new data collection: we’re using the HESA Student collection and the individual learner record (ILR), with the usual adjustments to count each student once in each academic year.

For 2028-29 the cutoff date for applying to OfS for registration is midnight on 30 June 2026, with a decision point (about whether the courses in question would be eligible for funding designation) in September of 2027. The big gap there is to give OfS chance to register everyone – one of the risks identified in the consultation is the capacity of the regulator to register people, and given the recent pause in registration activity this is perhaps understandable.

If anyone is thinking of asking for forgiveness rather than permission, and recruiting more than 300 students before being registered there is a pretty hefty disincentive – at the point you do register you will lose a year of legitimate access to student finance (the so-called “correction year”) for every year you were over the threshold without registration.

There’s not a huge amount of new policy in the consultation response and associated announcements: we add government departments, the armed forces, and mayoral combined authorities to the list of exemptions. If you get your application in by 1 July 2026 (“in good time”) you will remain designated until your application is processed.

These changes will be authorised by amendments to the Education (Student Support) Regulations 2011 – which is bigger news than it sounds: these are the mechanism for raising tuition fees that has existed (with amendments) since the introduction of £9,000 fees in 2012: the government also has powers set fees with relation to academic credit (under the 2023 Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limit) Act. If that mechanism is being used to set 2027 fees, that suggests the expansion of the lifelong learning entitlement to a wider range of providers might not be something to look forward to in the short term.

Another wrinkle is the decision to apply this on an England-only basis. The consultation was split on this question (just 57 per cent agreed), but lead and franchise providers in the other UK nations will not be in scope for this policy. There is less franchising in the sense that DfE is concerned about in Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland – the majority relates to HE/FE partnerships though there are a few counterexamples (we spotted a partnership between the Bloomsbury Institute and Wrexham University, as one). But the Westminster government’s confidence that “appropriate mechanisms are in place to manage risks to public money” exists may have to be reconsidered should there be any change in the market.

While this is a sensible step as regards reducing the risk to students it does not solve the problem (remember there was £1bn worth of student finance that went to unregistered providers last year) by any means.

There is not really evidence to say that students are at less risk at smaller franchise providers (indeed, you could argue that larger providers are more likely to have systems and capacity to protect the student interest), there’s nothing on the promotion of such provision (see Jim’s list of scary examples on social media), and we have yet to see the outcomes of September’s OfS consultation on conditions of registration on lead partners with more than 100 students studying via subcontractual arrangements or understand how they will interact with this policy.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that these plans don’t address approaches to subcontractual delivery that involve validation rather than franchising, or the activities of subsidiaries wholly owned by the lead provider.