HEPI: The Office for Students needs to walk and chew gum – by Jo Johnson

The Higher Education Policy Institute will be publishing the hard-hitting piece below by Lord (Jo) Johnson questioning the Office for Students' decision to pause (a) the registration of higher education institutions, (b) the granting of degree-awarding powers and (c) applications for University Title.

In his former role as the Minister for Universities and Science, Jo Johnson was responsible for the establishment of the OfS, which was designed to promote supply-side reform and new providers.

The pause will be debated in the House of Lords on Thursday, 30 January 2025.

Separately, HEPI will be publishing a paper on the pro-Palestine encampments on university campuses on Thursday, 30 January. 

This blog is by Jo Johnson, Executive Chairman of FutureLearn, a Member of the Council of the Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology and a Visiting Professor of King's College London. He served as Universities and Science Minister under David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson. 

There's plenty to like about the Office for Students' proposed newfive year strategy, now out for consultation and being debated in Parliament on the 30 January.

Best of all, to my mind, is that the Teaching Excellence Framework is at the heart of the regulator's new integrated approach to quality. Given the interests ranged against it, few would have put money on the TEF making it to the tenth anniversary of the Green Paper that made the case for it. 

We're a long way from 2017 when ‘abolish TEF' was Labour policy – the new Government and the OfS deserve credit for recognising that if it didn't exist, they would surely be designing something very much like it. 

There is, however, one major problem with the regulator and that's the OfS's failure to support the innovation vital to our success as a knowledge economy. 

Competition and choice were enshrined in the General Duties of the new regulator, in the very first lines of the Higher Education and Research Act (2017), with an importance second only to the need to have regard to institutional autonomy. 

Which is why the recent decision to ‘pause' applications to the Register and for Degree Awarding Powers (DAPs) from new entrants, so the OfS can focus on the financial sustainability of some woebegone incumbents, is a shockingly poor one. 

It pains me to see the OfS give up on supporting start-ups and with such an embarrassingly weak justification for doing so. 

A few trailblazers – including the Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology, the New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering, the London Interdisciplinary School and The Engineering & Design Institute: London – have in recent years managed to acquire their own DAPs, highlighting in their different ways the value that new providers can bring. 

But they are the exception and, as Mary Curnock Cook and Professor Sir Malcolm Grant noted in a brilliant Hepi piece a few years ago, all new entrants tell of the burden of regulatory oversight and of a stifling of their desire to innovate. 

Such are the procedural barriers to entry the OfS has erected that new entrants invariably have to take on expensive consultants who advise them to shape themselves as much as possible in the cookie-cutter mould of existing institutions.

I said that this pause was a shocking decision. In fact, it is sadly all too predictable. 

As Independent Higher Education has been saying to anyone who will listen, OfS service standards for those seeking registration or DAPs have long been lamentable, promises of better performance have not been kept (despite a hike in OfS fees) and this pause and warning of a ‘staggered' (ie even worse service) approach to re-opening in the future represents a new low.

There seems always a ready excuse for the OfS not focusing on innovation and deprioritising this part of its statutory duties – first it was the task of getting existing providers on the Register, then the COVID maelstrom and now the need to deal with the financial troubles of some providers paying the price for weak financial management and poor governance. 

This is a worrying pattern – and, given that new providers recruit more than most from disadvantaged and underrepresented groups, it will also, if it persists, make it harder for the new Government to achieve its ambitions for widening participation and access to higher education. 

I cannot imagine the pause would withstand legal challenge if tested. 

That might well become necessary. 

For there is reason to fear the pause will become semi-permanent. 

That's because there is no sign that financial pressures on institutions will have abated by August, when the OfS says it will start to gradually re-open the window for applications for registration and DAPs. Indeed, there is every chance, unless the Government commits to annual inflationary increases in tuition fees, that a number of providers will be much further up the creek by then than they are now. 

As I say, the OfS is under a statutory obligation, set out in the Higher Education and Research Act, to support choice and innovation in provision. 

It's not a perfect analogy, but imagine Ofgem, which has similar duties to enable competition and innovation, refusing to allow in new suppliers of renewable energy. Or Ofcom turning away broadband start-ups. Surely, that would be unthinkable. For that matter, how is this pause consistent with Sir Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves and the business secretary urging watchdogs to tear down the regulatory barriers that hold back economic growth, the ‘absolute top priority for the Government'?

It's surely the opposite.

And, of course, the real irony is that freezing the OfS Register and DAPs in aspic will probably worsen financial sustainability rather than promote it. 

Telling the world that the regulator is so snowed under with handling institutional failure that it can't do the rest of its job sends a dismal message to international students, to the institutions bringing diversity to the sector and to investors interested in supporting English higher education.

The OfS should hit the unpause button. 

If it won't do that, then it must at the very least during this period of pause make clear that it will be open for business for mergers and acquisitions (ie entities needing to transfer DAPs and UT from ailing institutions) that prevents financial risks from crystalising. 

The risk otherwise is that institutions at risk of failure cannot seek timely OfS approval for the transfer of their DAPs / UT to white knights that want to come to their rescue. 

How would that be in the student interest? 

The OfS should be able to walk and chew gum, especially as it sets its own resource envelope, in agreement with DfE, through the level of fees that it charges those it regulates.

If it can't work out how to multi-task and really has to redeploy staff to financial sustainability, it should first deprioritise some of the newer headline-grabbing conditions of registration it has imposed in response to ministerial whims du jour, before it walks away from the actual statutory duties given to it by Parliament. 

Finally, failure to discharge the responsibilities Parliament has given it should be a source of considerable embarrassment to the OfS given the turf war that it has waged over the quality function.

The long pause raises real questions about the sustainability of the OfS's refusal to appoint a new quality body to take on the role played by the Quality Assurance Agency after it was de-designated in March 2023. 

If the OfS can't promptly resume one of the most important duties given to it in HERA, it should run a quick process to find a new Designated Quality Body, so that some other organisation can get on with it.