The new OfS chair identifies ten trends

In a few weeks, he will step down as Nottingham Trent’s vice chancellor and assume the role of Chair of the Office for Students (OfS) – having been a key player in Philip Augar’s Post-18 review of education and funding, and therefore the creation of the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE).

So when Peck (along with Ben McCarthy, his project manager, and Jenny Shaw from Unite Students) publishes a HEPI policy note titled “The future of the campus university,” it is a signal, of sorts – a preview of how he reads the landscape, and perhaps how he intends to steer it.

The piece sketches ten trends that will reshape “the campus university” – a model that the authors say has survived the printing press, the internet, and MOOCs. It’s an interesting definitional framing – do they mean the physical infrastructure, the co-location of functions, the style of pedagogy, or the social imaginary?

It matters because the term subtly rules in and out different models of participation. The danger is one of conflating tradition with virtue – implying that proximity equals quality, or that a campus experience is inherently superior, even as a growing majority of students live elsewhere, work significant hours, and have social commitments that pull them beyond the perimeter.

Prove it

Parts of the paper grapple with generative AI and its implications. The authors observe that knowledge is increasingly ubiquitous and customisable, and argues that academic staff will need to focus more on cultivating higher-order skills – judgement, collaboration, critical thinking – rather than transmitting content.

But what the paper presents as a pedagogical evolution is arguably a more urgent existential reckoning, which calls for a closer focus on assessment. There’s a brief nod to personalised feedback, but the paper shies away from the implosion of traditional assessment validity in the age of AI. There’s also no mention of authentication, synchronous assessment, or supervised synthesis – and no challenge to the deeply embedded assumption that an essay proves anything any more.

If universities don’t radically revise what counts as learning quickly – and how educators know if learning has happened – the sector risks becoming a certification service for work that students didn’t meaningfully do.

We almost certainly need a new language for learning that focuses on what students can do, not what they can produce – and that means project-based work, portfolio-based credit, and integrated interdisciplinary learning as standard. Our threadbare transcripts and ancient degree classification system look lost when Europe is doing things like this.

That said, the paper makes a good argument that reshaped curricula may also include an enhanced emphasis on emerging core strengths for the future world, such as facilitating collaboration, exercising judgement and reconciling diverse perspectives:

Students will need to develop the agency to take ownership of their learning, make informed decisions and actively shape their future. While some of these skills can be developed independently, many are best enabled by, or actively rely on, face-to-face contact within a learning community.

It also reminds us of the assumption that the acquisition of many of these skills takes place outside of the classroom or laboratory, through students engaging in co-curricular or extra-curricular activities – and that a changing labour market will need a greater emphasis on interdisciplinary capability.

There’s an indirect direct challenge to the heavy subject-specialisation that characterises UK HE in there. But in a sector responding to financial pressures by obliterating optionality and resisting credit transfer, the paper seems to hope for change – without identifying the incentives or structures to cause it.

Supporting students

Perhaps inevitably given the authors’ DfE roles, the paper elevates student support to a central function of higher education. It is right to argue that what once sat on the periphery of provision is rapidly becoming the primary task for young people in an extended “middle stage” – and is also right that student expectations are changing, increasingly informed by what young people experience in schools.

There is also value in its insistence that student support needs to move from a discretionary add-on to the strategic core. The paper draws attention to mental health needs, and reads as a sincere concern for how institutions respond to vulnerability – not just as an individual crisis, but as a structural feature of post-pandemic, financially stretched student life. That feels, if nothing else, like a real challenge to the franchised-to credential factories that have been growing in large urban areas – even if they do end up on the OfS register.

But the framing also feels oddly impersonal. Student support is treated as a system input rather than a moral obligation, and the policy language is managerial – risk identification, predictive analytics, resourcing workflows – rather than relational. Reading it you feel the absence of the human stories – the student walking three miles to a library with heating, the carer logging onto a lecture at midnight, the apprentice navigating digital systems never designed with them in mind – and the role that students should play in supporting each other.

And while the paper identifies the pressure to expand support, it arguably underplays the consequences of failure. Legal action, student drop-out, and mental health crises are not just risks to reputation – they’re symptoms of a system whose safety nets are threadbare.

Those calling for statutory rights or enforceable service standards will note the gesture towards the team’s guidance on “compassionate communication.” But without system-wide entitlements and accountability, the danger is that compassion remains the responsibility of the heroic few.

The paper’s section on changing demographics notes the impending dip in eighteen year olds and the need to engage mature and modular learners – noting that participation seems to be stalling, if not declining, among young people from the most financially disadvantaged backgrounds.

This, the authors argue, means that learners of all ages engaging in Level 4 and 5 courses or modules will start to address longstanding government and employers concerns about the large numbers of people whose education stopped at Level 3.

But the idea that “having the same access to loans for fees and maintenance as full-time undergraduates” will make that happen is surely flawed – if FT maintenance isn’t enough at 60 credits a year, halving it won’t be enough to support PT participation either, if that even is what is to be delivered.

And it all misses the pressing need to enable what we currently think of as full-time students to slow down a little – because it may well be the pressure of being the fastest-completing bachelors graduates in the OECD that is driving the intensification of support needs.

Regulation as nudge

For those keen to read the regulatory runes, there’s both comfort and concern. On scope, the paper argues that regulation designed to promote the interests of students “must concern itself with the quality of institutional support they receive across all of their experiences,” which surely is a nod towards issues like harassment and sexual misconduct and mental health rather than the sort of strict focus on academic quality and management and governance some would like to see.

But it also relies on institutional goodwill – assuming providers will adopt good practice once they “become aware” of them, rather than establishing the need for enforceable minimum standards, with independent monitoring, and clear consequences.

And in that vein, the section on students as consumers feels quite odd. We’re told that the most powerful possible response from providers to mass legal action, parental concerns about contact hours or debt without a boost to earning potential is to:

…demonstrate that every interaction with students contributes positively… always putting the interests of the customer first.

There’s a lot to be said for treating students better, and less like they’re lucky to be there. But at the heart of the problems identified are marketing-led expectations that universities can’t deliver on the regulated fee, a lack of redress when even reasonable expectations aren’t met, and a failure to finance or facilitate the sort of communities that enable students to set their interests in a wider context.

Students, in other words, need more power – both individually, and collectively, and beyond the mere ability to choose. The next iteration of OfS will need to avoid conflating institutional benevolence with agency and accountability.