I beg to move,
That this House has considered the Office for Students.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dame Maria. Higher education is unanimous in recognising the need for effective regulation. The UK has an international reputation for the quality and strength of our higher education sector. Everyone involved in the sector I have spoken to or corresponded with understands the role that effective and proportionate regulation has to play in improving standards and maintaining that reputation. I thank everyone who has been in contact since they saw this debate timetabled.
The Office for Students was created in 2018 with the aim of ensuring that higher education in England delivers positive outcomes for students. Its mission statement is:
“to ensure that every student, whatever their background, has a fulfilling experience of higher education that enriches their lives and careers.”
However, there are increasingly concerns that it has become overly bureaucratic, imposes increasingly high costs on providers, takes an inconsistent view on what does and does not affect the quality of student education, and has become more concerned with extending its areas of oversight to meet the desires of the Government of the day than the needs, experiences and views of the students for whom it is supposed to exist.
Regulation is vital for any sector, but it comes with financial and resource costs that must be proportional to the risk, and must represent value for money. The cost of regulation for providers should be an important concern for the OfS, as ultimately that cost is felt by the students. The HE sector has to contend with regulatory overlap; there are multiple regulators in the HE, further education and technical education sectors, as well as multiple subject-level, professional, statutory and regulatory bodies.
The Government’s own regulatory code outlines the principle that regulators
“should collectively follow the principle of ‘collect once, use many times’ when requesting information from those they regulate.”
It also says that regulators should
“share information with each other…to help target resources and activities and minimise duplication.”
It says:
“Regulators should avoid imposing unnecessary regulatory burdens through their regulatory activities”,
and
“should choose proportionate approaches to those they regulate, based on relevant factors including, for example, business size and capacity.”
Is the OfS adopting that approach? In the past few years, it has spent a great deal of time continually revising its regulatory frameworks and processes, including the B conditions of registration on quality and standards, the access and participation regime and the Teaching Excellence Framework.
In 2022, there were a number of significant consultations running simultaneously, and major consultations were run with very short response periods. For example, the consultations on quality and standards, B3, TEF and underpinning data all ran at the same time. The supporting documents for those consultations ran to a total of
more than 700 pages, and the sector had just eight weeks to respond to all of them. That approach results in a very high cost to institutions, and risks undermining the quality of data submitted due to the compressed timetable. For example, one Universities UK member had 10 full-time equivalent staff supporting regulatory compliance at an approximate staff cost of £444,000. Another institution estimated the cost of regulatory activities to be £1.1 million in 2022-23.
Such demands place a higher relative cost on smaller providers, which not only lack the resource of the larger providers but tend to offer a wider range of education, including higher education, degree apprenticeships—the Minister’s favourite—further education and other industry-specific continuous professional development. That means that they must deal with a large number of regulators in addition to the OfS, including the Institute for Apprentices and Technical Education, the Education and Skills Funding Agency and Ofsted. Unfortunately, that does not just mean reporting for some students to one regulator and for others to another. Degree apprenticeship students have to be reported to both the OfS and IFATE in significantly different ways. GuildHE reported that one provider needed separate data teams for the two bodies.
On average, the cost of regulation for a student studying HE in a FE college that has only a small HE provision is £289, compared with £14 for a student studying at a large HE institute. That cost is even more pronounced in the light of the lower tuition fees charged by many colleges—£6,165, in contrast with the higher education fees of £9,250.
In the same report on regulation in smaller universities and specialist colleges, GuildHE said:
“Overly-legalistic language in communications, delays in meeting their own deadlines, short consultation periods, consultations’ outcomes that rarely listen to the views of those consulted and political capture”
were regular complaints from their members. Those complaints are repeated in the results of the OfS’s own survey, “Report for the Office of Students: Provider engagement”. Its executive summary said:
“Providers are confused by the complexity of some OfS processes, communications and consultations, and related tasks require high levels of resource by providers.”
It went on:
“Providers would like a more transparent, collaborative, and consultative relationship with the OfS with a shared focus on student outcomes, including opportunities to contribute and share good practice.”
Specifically on smaller providers, it concluded:
“Small providers felt that the OfS was geared towards large established universities and didn’t acknowledge their different levels of resourcing and experience.”
Furthermore, the report read:
“Smaller and further education providers feel that their different circumstances and student audiences are not recognised by the OfS and that the regulator failed to adapt their approach accordingly.”
Those complaints go to the heart of the student experience. HE students are not a homogeneous group and a diverse HE ecosystem is required to meet their needs, but the OfS seems to be operating an overbearing, one-size-fits-all approach. It appears that that approach suits no one, as the report also said:
“Established providers felt they should be treated differently from newer providers and that communications they received didn’t reflect their low-risk track record.”
In the guidance for condition B4, all registered providers are now expected to retain—this is ridiculous—five years of all student assessment. Conservative estimates from Universities UK of what digitalising and storing work on such a scale might cost an institution resulted in figures of between £270,000 and more than £1 million a year. That does not include the environmental cost.
The requirement also poses difficulties for subjects such as art, design, performing arts, and medical and veterinary subjects. Such subjects use a range of approaches to assessment, including continuous assessment based on a series of exchanges. To digitally record all those exchanges would be inappropriate and would entail GDPR issues. The retention of students’ work in the arts presents difficulties over intellectual property rights, which return to students on graduation.
I am not alone in being particularly concerned about the recent announcement that the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education will no longer be the Secretary of State for Education’s designated quality body. That means that it will no longer be responsible for assessing quality and standards in English higher education to inform the OfS’s regulatory decision making. The QAA has relinquished its role because the work it was being asked to undertake in England on behalf of the OfS was no longer compliant with recognised quality standards, namely the European standards and guidance that are monitored by the European Quality Assurance Register for Higher Education.
As the Minister will be aware, the QAA has been in existence for over 25 years. The system it has established is regarded by many countries as the gold standard in quality enhancement and benchmarking and it is still in operation in Wales. Its withdrawal in England is entirely due to the conditions that the OfS has insisted on how their reviews are undertaken.
Among the issues that led to non-compliance were the OfS’s refusal to publish reports on providers, ending the cyclical review of all providers and the insistence that student representatives—remember that this is the OfS—should no longer be part of review teams. The sector is still waiting for clarification on how the OfS would replace the QAA’s role in terms of breadth and activity beyond investigations. Will the OfS now become the regulator, the enforcer and the assessor of quality? If that is the case, how can there not be a conflict of interest?