One thing I’ve not covered in detail in today’s piece on franchising is the government’s response to the former Public Accounts Committee’s report on the issue.

One of the PAC’s headline recommendations was that DfE should set out requirements for providers to publish summaries of their franchise agreements, including the proportion of funding they retain and for what purpose, so students know what this means for them.

The government agrees that there is a “strong case” for greater transparency – and will ask the OfS to consider requiring providers to publish proportion and purposes when OfS next makes changes to ongoing conditions of registration.

PAC also suggested that OfS set out the proportion of fees lead providers could be seen as reasonably retaining in relation to the student services they remain responsible for, and consider these financial arrangements in the scope of any investigations it carries out into the quality of franchised provision.

OfS is saying a yes on the latter, but that complexity and diversity prevents the former. Pity.

DfE was invited to set out what it will do to strengthen direct and indirect oversight of franchised providers to ensure they meet the standards expected for an organisation receiving taxpayers’ money – which it said could include requiring all providers to register with OfS in some form.

All we have in response to that is that the government agrees in principle, and will consult on proposals to strengthen oversight of partnership delivery in higher education, with news coming by January 2025.

DfE is also clear that work needs to be done towards a more “robust model” for protecting public money – and that’s likely to involve a more substantial role for OfS than at present:

The department will be developing options for legislative change, if required.

Despite the complex regulatory system, roles and responsibilities for fraud prevention, detection and intervention are undefined, said the committee – on that, the department has agreed a joint Incident Response plan between DfE, OfS and SLC for responding to cases where there is a potential risk to public funding.

What is full time, and what is attendance?

Although SLC uses data on attendance to show student’s course engagement, and therefore pay loans, the committee was concerned that there remains no agreed definition of what constitutes attendance or engagement.

PAC said that DfE should work quickly to clarify what constitutes student attendance and meaningful engagement with courses – ensuring sufficient engagement with providers, and publish guidance as soon as possible.

Despite the government agreeing, DfE’s answer on this is that it has published (on the Student Loans Company website) guidance on attendance management, against which providers can be held to account in relation to the release of SLC tuition fee payments – and the department is engaging with the devolved governments to support consistency across administrations where possible.

The problem is that the Attendance Management guidance that appeared at the end of June on the Student Finance England website does nothing to fill the “agreed definition of what constitutes attendance or engagement” hole – rather, it just says that everyone should have a policy on it.

Notwithstanding that UKVI have been consulting on something rather more specific for international students, what’s surreal about the SFE note is that it doesn’t cross reference readers back to its Higher Education Student Finance in England – Assessing Eligibility guidance that it updates each year.

That says that FT courses should normally require students to (my bolding):

…attend the institution or elsewhere for periods amounting to at least 24 weeks within the year. Attendance can include study, lectures, tuition, learning in the workplace, or sandwich work-placement that does not meet the criteria to be sandwich year out, which amount to an average of at least 21 hours per week (i.e. 504 hours over the duration of the year).

As I noted ages ago on the site, if you were to read “attend the institution or elsewhere” as “leaving the house” alongside some of the ads I keep seeing on social media, it’s hard to believe that those courses are indeed “full time” for the purposes of the regs.

That doesn’t mean that previously the SLC was insisting that all “full-time” courses had 21 contact hours or more, but it does mean that it assumed that the rest of the 21 hours might be made up of bodding about the library, dropping in to academics’ office hours or meeting chums to work on a group project.

So we might assume that in the internet age, as long as a student is required to put in 21 hours or more on average either in-person or virtually, they’re on an FT course.

But that can’t be the case – because distance learners can’t get maintenance loans at all. So you might then ask, OK – how distant can you allow a student to be before it ceases to be an eligible course for a maintenance loan?

This time, SLC says:

“distance learning course” means a course on which a student undertaking the course is not required to be in attendance by the institution providing the course, where “required to be in attendance” is not satisfied by a requirement imposed by the institution to attend any institution (a) for the purposes of registration or enrolment or any examination; (b) on a weekend or during any vacation; or (c) on an occasional basis during the week.

However you read that paragraph, it can’t be the case that SLC regards logging on to a Zoom call as “attending” an “institution” because if it did, its definition of “distance” would be completely meaningless.

Confusingly, later on in a section explaining distance learning, SLC then says (my bolding):

It is understood that FT means that students are required to undertake their course on most days of the week and for most weeks of the year.

If that’s the case then plenty of the franchised provision is FT but is not being sold as FT. In other words, “we’ll only ask you to study in the mornings” would be OK, but “you can complete the course over 2 days a week” or “you can do the course at weekends” feels like it fails.

Bits of this were relaxed during the pandemic – but a note from 2021 riffing off the full relaxation of Covid-era restrictions then confuses things a little further:

A full-time course where a student is physically attending the provider on a regular basis for a substantial amount of time (e.g. for lectures, tutorials, learning in the workplace and studying at providers’ libraries) will attract loans for living costs and, where applicable, dependants grants and/or DSA.

“Regular” and “substantial” appear to support a “Monday/Tuesday you’re in and the rest of the week you can work” message. It also says:

The fact that certain parts of a course may be provided online and can be followed by a student without being in physical attendance, does not necessarily mean that that course will be classified as a distance learning course. As before, the nature of the courses will be assessed taking account of the required pattern of attendance across the course as a whole. If a provider agrees a pattern of attendance for an individual student that requires only occasional attendance during the week, then that student may be classified as a distance learner for the purposes of student support.

There “attend” obviously does mean “not in your own house”, and “occasional” is effectively being contrasted with “regular”. But that would all suggest that:

• a 60 credits a year full-time course that only actually requires attending in-person for an hour a week would attract full loans for living costs;
• a 30 credits a year part-time course that requires a student to be in for 2.5 full days a week would only get half the maintenance loan;
• a 60 credits a year full-time course that requires you to be on campus for 6 hours a day for 5 days in your first week, but never requires you to be on campus again, would be “distance” and you’d have no entitlement to a loan.

I raise all of this not because I think the patterns of attendance that are being promoted as flexible should somehow lose their loan entitlement – although I am increasingly concerned by the normalisation of the idea that you can comfortably undertake full-time study on part-time hours.

I raise it because for the “part-time” or “distance” learners above who are getting a pro-rata maintenance or no loan at all, the guidance as it all stands is manifestly and patently unfair – and needs urgent clarification.

Now that we’re in an era of having to think not just of “away from home” students and “commuter students”, but dangerously normalising those that are in the overlap of those two categories, it really does all need sorting out.

The LLE would have been a good opportunity to do that – but the extent to which it’s wise to keep making it possible to undertake a FT degree in part-time hours and miles from campus is as much a strategic one as it is a technical one.

Just how “efficient” should we be making the lives of our learners? And how possible should it be to sell a course as “full-time” in a way that attracts “full-time” student support when it doesn’t appear to be so?