You run the library – which has been a 24 hour facility for a few years now – at a higher education provider. You’ve just been handed a “straight line” cut from the centre.

You look at usage data and determine that a small but hardcore percentage of students are in overnight. Do you:

1. Cut the library’s opening hours – after all, it’s bad for students’ health to be in overnight so you’re helping their mental health. And nobody’s going to know they can complain.
2. Propose that all advertising on 24 hours is culled and restrict 24 hours access to 2nd and 3rd years, “teaching out” the overnight commitment.

Here’s another. You run the Humanities faculty that has just been handed a “straight line” cut from the centre. Plenty of modules on your loss-making English degree are single-person taught options, plenty have unusually low class sizes and a number of English academics have applied for VR. Do you:

1. Let a number of them go – after all, you’re still offering some choice, and there’s bound to be a way of framing the changes that suggest you’re actually improving the student experience.
2. Engage in a complex commitment to “teach out” the choice that is on offer so that for new students, there’s less choice – but for 2nd and 3rd years the breadth of the degree as promised is protected.

The point about the Office for Students’ Financial sustainability of higher education providers in England report for 2024 is that it’s full of jargonistic euphemisms – as are the edicts that often emerge from the “centre” on cost savings. But they have real-world impacts on students and what they were promised.

Being bold

OfS says that providers will need to take “additional, or more significant, action” to fully respond to the financial risks that the sector is facing. An increasing number of providers will need to make “significant changes to their funding model”.

“Bold steps” may need to be taken to manage tightening finances and reduce costs. To be fair, OfS does say that they are “likely to have consequences” – and true to form, it says that might result in “positive change and innovation” – but others will need to guard carefully against a “negative impact on the quality of students’ education and their wider experience”.

It notes that many higher education providers have taken, or are taking, action to manage tightening finances, including making cost savings, “rationalising courses, modules and other activities”, and “making other efficiencies”.

It adds that the scale of the current financial challenges facing the sector means there is an increasing need for “further and bolder” efforts to make cost savings to maintain financial sustainability into the longer term.

These, it says, could impact the “choice, educational experience and support available” to existing and prospective students, and the development of skills for industry and to support local and national economies.

And it could result in “significant rationalisation” of courses that are not financially sustainable, reducing the “breadth and depth” of academic provision available to students.

Decisions, decisions

The Office for Students has a remit over student choice – and says that it’s important students consider their choices carefully and look at any information relevant to them. It says that among many factors, students may want to think carefully about courses, course costs,

the quality of teaching and contact hours, levels of student satisfaction and so on.

There’s historical data on all of that. But if I was a student applying to a university having read this report, it’s obvious that relying on historical data is becoming a less and less useful guide to future performance. And so I’d want to know what the risks were to my programme closing or changing significantly, my provider collapsing, or most of my modules disappearing.

Yet if I read my provider’s live “Student Protection Plan”, almost all of them still paint a rosy picture on risk. If 40 per cent of providers are about to post a deficit, we might expect that to be reflected in their SPPs. It isn’t.

The other thing that’s supposed to help is that whatever a university says it’s going to offer, it (within ongoing improvements reason) it then has a legal duty to offer it.

And if providers are “bold”, the chances of many providers holding to those promises are for the birds.

So here’s the question. What’s to stop a provider from opting A in each of my examples above – despite the aspect of provision being promised?

Ongoing compliance

There’s a lone line in the financial sustainability report – one that says it is important that providers continue to meet their regulatory obligations, including those relating to quality, consumer protection and access and participation.

There’s a slightly longer line in the accompanying insight brief:

They must also ensure their ongoing compliance with consumer protection law. Where changes are made to the design and delivery of a course, the resources available to students, or their range of course options, the course should remain as it was originally advertised to students, with any disruption minimised and clearly communicated.

I won’t repeat again the woeful lack of protection on offer to students whose programmes or wider offer is subject to cuts. What I would say is that in 2019, OfS received statutory guidance from the Secretary of State under section 2(3) of HERA that asked it to prioritise work to ensure students have clear information on which to base their choices, that students should receive what is promised to them by providers, and that contractual terms are clear and fair.

Apart from a mysterious partnership with National Trading Standards that it has never reported on, it has made no visible progress on those objectives at all.

In 2019, OfS said that the information available to support student choice is inadequate because it is not always sufficiently detailed about the things that matter to students, that the contractual relationship between students and providers is unequal and that students are placed at a disadvantage because terms are designed to favour the provider, and that it is not easy for students to identify instances where they have not received the service they were promised and to seek redress.

If it was a problem then, then the euphemisms in the financial sustainability report would have to suggest that the famously “risk-based regulator” should be assuming that’s a much bigger problem now.

But there’s basically nothing. Even last June, OfS belatedly promised that it would carry out additional research and polling on student consumer protection issues, use this intelligence to inform proposals for a revised approach, and consider the extent to which it is appropriate for OfS to set requirements that go beyond those in consumer protection law.

Beyond work on formal provider exit, nothing ever happens. Nothing happens at all.

Righting the wrongs

But things are happening. Services are being slashed. Module catalogues are being culled. There’s something quite miserable about being invited to multiple student-led teaching award events this spring, only to hear gossip in the vaping area of the venue noting that winner A or winner B is at risk of redundancy. But none of those students realise they have rights in these scenarios.

If I was a savvy student, I’d be forgiven for assuming that the supposedly “student interests” regulator (one that was carefully positioned distinctly from provider interests) is doing its level best to avoid anything that might strengthen students’ ability to enforce their rights to what they were promised in order to smooth the path for providers to make savings.

Even at a system level, there’s a huge student interest risk from the “consolidation of courses and providers”, as well as potential market exits, which reduces the range and diversity of providers and limits student choice. OfS might not be able to intervene, but it is proactively monitoring the situation? There’s no evidence that it is.

OfS says there could be a reduction of providers’ research activities, particularly research they fund, which has an impact on system-wide research capacity and innovation. Is that being proactively monitored, by OfS or UKRI? There’s no evidence that it is.

Yes, of course it is the case that on one level, the ongoing sustainability of a higher education provider can be said to be in students’ interests. But the extent to which OfS has shifted from those original promises to be a regulator in students’ rather than providers’ interests is vast and visceral.

It can improve its student engagement efforts all it likes. But as long as students bemoan having promises broken and choice snatched away is as long as OfS will have failed in its basic purpose to protect students’ interests.