The sector had issues with the OfS even before the Sussex judgement

There are a lot of numbers in the latest Office for Students stakeholder survey report, but we will start with the most important ones.

13.02.26.

That’s the date fieldwork was completed – the very latest point that one of the 171 accountable officers who had the chance to complete the survey (a 40 per cent response rate) could have expressed their opinions about OfS.

Just over six weeks later, a high court judge said:

The fair-minded, informed and not unduly suspicious observer would in my view conclude that there was a real possibility that the decision-maker here was biased in the sense of having a closed mind to the legal and factual merits of the university’s position

That was just the most damning paragraph in a judgement that neatly and effectively weighed up OfS’ regulatory competence and impartiality, finding serious concerns on both fronts.

So when you read that more than half of respondents did not have confidence in the OfS as a regulator – that just 22 per cent of those in universities trusted OfS to treat their institution fairly – this is not an accurate impression of the way OfS is currently perceived in the sector.

This is the baseline, a point before some fairly profound failings were made public. A point where the sector believed the regulator, whether or not they liked it, could be confident in its confidence to correctly and defensibly levy a £585,000 fine on a medium-sized university after a breach of a regulatory condition.

The survey itself was launched in January. Then chief executive Susan Lapworth noted that:

Our previous research found that perceptions of the OfS’s communications and engagement had improved, and it gave us suggestions about how we can continue to strengthen these relationships. We encourage the head of every institution to take part in the survey. Your feedback will help us to continually improve and will have a direct impact on the way we engage with institutions for years to come.

Some responses are presented split by type of institution. Universities (54 completed, a 48 per cent response rate) were the most likely group to respond. Response rates hovered around the 45th percentile for specialist:creative, specialist:other, and the wider “other” category – but just 29 per cent of eligible FECs chose to respond.

Just 27 per cent of respondents believed that OfS was “effective” or “very effective” as a regulator – among universities the figure was just 8 per cent. Fascinating stuff. But the main data tables, presented as an appendix within the PDF report, do not routinely show these splits – we only see them by exception.

There is a school of thought that suggests that the negative attitude of the sector towards OfS is the remnant of a belief that the sector should not be regulated at all. The survey tested this hypothesis and found it wanting – 96 per cent of respondents thought that having a higher education regulator was somewhat or very important. Just one percent disagreed. Even among those with a negative perception of the OfS some 93 per cent of respondents agreed that having a regulator was important.

The problem is not a disdain for regulation. The problem is the OfS – just under three quarters of providers were unable to agree that they would be able to raise questions or concerns about OfS without negative regulatory consequences. Less than half agreed that they trusted OfS to treat their institution fairly.

Just fifty-six percent were able to agree that the Office for Students acts in the best interests of students.

It would have been useful to see these results benchmarked against the performance of other regulators. As the OfS survey used a custom dataset it is difficult to independently draw these conclusions – but we should note that the most recent (2024) central government survey of “businesses’ perception of regulation in the UK” found that a third of UK businesses agreed that “most regulation is fair and proportionate” while forty six per cent actively disagreed with that position. These impressions will be based on businesses’ engagement with multiple spheres of regulation.

All in all, this baseline measure – collected prior to the publication of serious judicial criticism of OfS – is unpromising. But it is difficult not to wonder what these results would look like if fieldwork had been conducted later in the year.