It’s OfS board paper time again – the meeting on 7 October, a swift five weeks after the event by recent standards, with Edward Peck’s latest video once again doing most of the explaining.
Of the seventeen items on the agenda, two had no paper and ten are “considered to be exempt from publication”. We’re left with the July minutes, the Chair’s report, the Chief Executives’ report, an operating environment paper (minus two of its three annexes) and the Quality Assessment Committee report.
It’s worth remembering what the rules here are. OfS’ publication scheme says it publishes the papers presented to its board, and that it applies Freedom of Information Act exemptions only “where disclosure would cause significant harm” – a high bar for ten out of seventeen items to clear at a single meeting.
Meeting pages used to at least say which exemption was being applied – “policy in development” or “legally privileged”, as on the September 2020 and December 2024 pages. Since February 2025 they just say “exempt”, leaving us to guess which exemption is being relied on, what significant harm publication would do, and whether anyone has weighed the public interest in releasing it.
Still, there are shards of insight – and the richest seam is the minutes of the July meeting.
On franchising, OfS received 35 applications for registration from franchise providers – “more than expected” – with a target of completing assessments by August 2027. It is now triaging them and looking at how to move resources around “to maximise protection of public funding”.
In the same update, the board was told that the NSS shows high levels of satisfaction at many large franchised providers, “including those where we have concerns over quality”, before the rest of the paragraph disappears – which will make for interesting reading alongside the new TEF’s use of student experience data.
The minutes also record that three individuals at the University of Greater Manchester have been arrested on suspicion of money laundering, and that OfS is carrying out its own investigation into the provider, which had already picked up a specific condition of registration in February.
Governance regulation, meanwhile, has slipped again. Last October we were told OfS was developing policy in this area, with a letter to providers and a consultation in 2026. The July minutes now record a decision to postpone the consultation on management and governance conditions until late 2027, “to ensure that our consultations are spread more evenly”.
On money, DfE’s consultation on the OfS fee model covers registration fees and a more comprehensive charge for DAPs applications, and the board was reminded that OfS can already charge providers for investigations – the next bit is exempt. The £50m cut to the Strategic Priorities Grant arrived so late that OfS gave providers indicative allocations for the first time, and a consultation on reforming the grant is still promised for this autumn, subject to DfE making its mind up on priorities.
On financial sustainability, OfS’ plan is initially to tell only providers in risk categories 3 and 4 what it thinks of their finances – even though its own Provider Panel advised that, in the interests of transparency, every provider should be told.
The new Financial Sustainability Advisory Panel, which first met on 9 June, did a deep dive on a single provider and backed a shift towards medium-term viability rather than short-term insolvency risk. That’s probably just as well, given the operating environment paper confirms the government has told the Education Committee it does not intend to introduce a university insolvency scheme – which leaves the student protection question precisely where it was.
The board also spent time on mergers and group structures, noting that larger organisations are not necessarily more efficient, that group structures could create “organisational opacity”, and that it would like a paper on the implications of increasing private equity investment in the sector “in the coming months”.
There’s some student-facing material. The NSS shows “a consistent pattern of less positive responses” from disabled students, and there has been an increase in students citing race, sex, and religion or belief as barriers to progression.
And early thinking on access and participation would align its assessment with the new TEF, increase the focus on participation, and build “pathways towards regulatory intervention” – with the next two paragraphs, naturally, exempt.
On sexual misconduct, the July minutes said the Provider Panel, Student Interest Board, and main board would all discuss OfS’ approach to publishing provider-level data – “transparency and reputational incentives” – at their October meetings. The operating environment paper duly notes Oxford research finding that one in five students there report having experienced sexual assault. What the Student Interest Board made of it all we can’t say, because its report is exempt.
The committee reports remain a genre of their own. The new Public Affairs Committee met for the first time on 20 May, and this is its entire published report.
“There was a robust discussion about the OfS’s current approach.”
The Chair’s report tells us the committee is “currently operating in an interim phase”, with longer-term appointments due from December. The Risk and Audit Committee, meanwhile, gently advised that risk mitigating actions should actually reduce the rating of the risk, “rather than describing work which would take place in any case”. This time round it gets a verbal update only.
The Chair’s report reveals that Peck has scaled back his own institutional visits since the arrival of joint Chief Executives Polly Payne and Ruth Hannant, but that all three attended a dinner at Hartpury University on 21 July, the details of which are – you guessed it – exempt.
On 25 August they met the Chair and Vice-Chancellor of Sussex for a “constructive discussion” about the lessons learned report and the future relationship, a couple of months before OfS was told it must pay Sussex’s full legal costs.
The Chief Executives’ report mostly lists things already published – the “no surprises” response to the Sussex judgment, the financial risk framework, the new E11 and E12 free speech conditions, and the commuter students research.
But a couple of numbers stand out. Around 19 providers will offer 157 LLE-fundable modules from January 2027, which is not exactly a modular revolution. And OfS has developed a crisis communication plan in response to a terrorist incident associated with a provider.
Finally, the Quality Assessment Committee report is a little meatier than usual. Following last November’s report on degree classification algorithms, OfS is now surveying providers with degree awarding powers about their use of algorithms. While sector bodies broadly accepted its concerns, some defended discounting students’ lowest marks as important for access and participation.
The committee also wants future analysis of how providers that have recently been granted DAPs are performing, and information on quality assessors and their training.
And what of the big stuff? The paper on options for the future operation of the TEF is exempt, despite the consultation now being open. So are the KPM targets, the DAPs reform paper, the business plan reprioritisation, and the risk report. Regulation, we’re told, should feel more like partnership and less like punishment. Partners, in my experience, tend to show you their workings.