My Lords, I would like to end by thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, for retabling this important amendment, which seeks to ensure that students in receipt of student support funding can access the dispute resolution scheme run by the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education—the OIA. In Committee, the noble Baroness set out a cogent case for ensuring that higher education students receiving public support should have access to this valuable service. We listened carefully to those concerns. As the noble Baroness pointed out, the 2011
higher education White Paper, Students at the Heart of the System, had already set out our intention to require that all higher education students receiving public support should have access to external dispute resolution. This was part of a wider package of measures aimed at developing a new regulatory framework across higher education that required legislation to implement it.
Increasingly, there are new and different providers offering higher education, not just the traditional university sector. Currently, students at these newer higher education providers do not always have the right to take their unresolved complaints to the OIA. A handful of alternative providers have so far voluntarily joined the OIA’s complaints handling scheme. However, we think that all higher education students receiving student support should be able to access this service, and the only way to achieve this is by requiring it in legislation. We have now tabled a government amendment to enable a much wider group of students in future to have access to the OIA’s complaint handling scheme. In practical terms, it means that full and part-time higher education students in receipt of student support and studying at alternative providers and further education colleges in England and Wales will be able to bring a complaint to the OIA.
In future, these students will be able to ask the OIA to look at unresolved student complaints on issues such as an institution failing to deliver courses as advertised or courses that are not fit for purpose; misleading or untrue information about a course; and complaints about teaching and facilities, bullying and harassment and welfare issues. We should also expect to see an improvement in complaint handling arrangements at those institutions required to join the OIA scheme. A major part of the OIA’s role is also to spread good practice in complaint handling more generally. I beg to move.