Office for Students

Debate between Emma Hardy and Paul Blomfield

Wednesday 26th April 2023 Westminster Hall

[Emma Hardy (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)]

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?

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a fine speech. I apologise for missing the beginning, because the debate started surprisingly early. She made a really important point about the QAA. Does she not agree that it is rather extraordinary that the QAA is no longer providing that role on the basis that it wanted to provide student voice, significantly? The gold standard she described requires the presence of student voice within the regulatory framework. Does that not go to the heart of the problem with the OfS at the moment? I recall, in a Public Bill Committee, discussing with the Minister at the time the fact that the OfS was set up with too small a student voice. That voice has become consistently more marginalised through its life.

[Emma Hardy]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I shall speak in more detail about how the voice of students has been marginalised. It seems fairly ridiculous that the Office for Students wants to exclude students when its whole core purpose and mission statement is to represent and promote the needs of students. There is a serious disconnect. I think we should be slightly ashamed of the fact that the QAA is moving out of that role within English institutions.

Although only 6% to 7% of higher education is taught in English FE colleges, they make up around 37% of providers registered with the OfS, and there are more FE colleges on the OfS register than universities. The Education and Skills Funding Agency and the Department for Education are the chief regulators for FE colleges, and several agencies have funding, regulatory and inspectorial roles in the FE. OfS requirements on quality and standard of teaching, student support and wellbeing and financial sustainability overlap with those in many instances.

Large institutions are not unaffected. Universities UK provided an example of one member reporting a total of 99 data returns being required for the 2022-23 academic year across not only the OfS, which represents only a small proportion of this number, but also professional, statutory and regulatory bodies, the Student Loans Company and the Office for National Statistics. That is being supported by a team of seven full-time staff members. Indeed, concerns about multiple and potentially duplicate data collections were recognised by the DfE in the creation of the higher education data reduction taskforce in 2022. I am hoping the Minister will be able to feed back with progress on that.

It has been argued by some that the focused remit for the OfS, as set out in the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, was already quite wide-ranging and too broad, with 25 conditions of registration. Over the past five years, the OfS has expanded its responsibilities to include as priorities unexplained grade inflation, harassment and sexual misconduct, mental health and wellbeing, freedom of speech, diversity or provision, modular provision, transnational education, partnership and franchise provision and non-OfS-funded provision such as additional teacher training and degree apprenticeships. With the withdrawal of the QAA, we must now assume quality assurance is a priority. Where is the compelling evidence for this expansion of OfS priorities beyond its original remit in HERA?

In 2022, the Higher Education Policy Institute’s student academic experience survey showed that the majority of students were comfortable about freedom of speech and showed a recovery in several aspects of students’ wellbeing, with the life satisfaction, life feeling worthwhile and happiness categories all increasing. Tackling harassment and sexual misconduct is of course crucial, but is that really the role of the OfS regulator? It is already covered by legislation. The Government’s summary of HERA suggests that the OfS’s primary aim was to make it easier for new higher education providers to enter the market and raise teaching and quality standards. What has driven the OfS to move so quickly into these other areas, bringing increased financial and resource costs for both regulator and regulated?

It seems that the OfS is disproportionately influenced by ministerial pressure. We have just heard of how the increased OfS burden increased regulatory scope, but providers are paying for that twice—once through the extra costs of data collection and administration, and again through a 13% increase in OfS fees to cover its own costs of moving into these extra areas, as announced in December last year. It is worth noting that the OfS was due a review of its fee model two years after its establishment, but that is yet to happen.

However, this is not an increase the OfS wanted in September 2020 when it committed to a 10% real-terms reduction in registration fees over two years. Then came guidance from the Secretary of State for Education and the Minister for Further and Higher Education in March 2022 advising that the fee reduction was not necessary in view of the priorities the OfS was being asked to pursue. This is neither the first nor the last incident of the priorities of the OfS not being set by the sector or, crucially, by the students, who it was set up for, but by the Government.

In November 2021, the Secretary of State and the Universities Minister write to the OfS requesting that it start requiring universities to work with schools to drive up academic standards. Three months later, the OfS puts out a press release saying that it will work with universities to

“put their shoulder to the wheel”

to increase attainment in schools. In March 2022, the Universities Minister writes to the OfS asking it to conduct on-site inspections. Two months later, the OfS puts out a press release saying—guess what?—that it will conduct on-site inspections. In March 2022, the Secretary of State and Universities Minister write to the OfS asking it to set conditions of registrations in relation to sexual harassment as soon as possible—and it goes on to do just that.

The OfS does not appear to be an independent regulator, driven by the needs of the student; it appears to be a regulator driven by the desires of the Government of the day. But it is not even when the OfS is directly required to do something, which I can understand. If the Minister just happens to mention that something is important, the OfS jumps to. In April 2018, Universities Minister Sam Gyimah is in the news announcing that he will keep a “laser-like” focus on vice-chancellors’ salaries. Guess what the OfS does two months later, without even being asked to? Two months later, it publishes a new requirement forcing universities leaders to justify their salaries.

In April 2021, the then Universities Minister, the right hon. Member for Chippenham (Michelle Donelan), is in the news for announcing that she is “appalled” by inclusive assessment practices that do not mark down students with incorrect grammar. Again, there was no direct request of the OfS, but guess what? Two months later, the OfS launches a review of inclusive assessment practices. In February 2022, the same Universities Minister is in the news, calling for universities to end all online learning. The next month, the OfS launches a review of blended learning.

Where is the regulatory independence that holds students at its very core? The Government do not even need to write to the OfS to get it to do what they want. They just need to issue a press release, and now they have a member of the Conservative party, who chooses to retain the party Whip, sitting in the House of Lords who is the chair of the OfS. As the Minister is aware, Lord Wharton had no previous experience in higher education. He did, however, run the leadership campaign for the man who appointed him.

Last year, while chair of the OfS, Lord Wharton spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Budapest, Hungary. He endorsed the recent victory of the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, a man who had been widely criticised for a host of restrictions on human rights and democratic practices—specifically, for attacks on academic freedom including, infamously, shutting down the independent Central European University. Lord Wharton said that CPAC was a

“great chance to pick up new ideas…reconnect with friends across the world”

and

“fight for the values that we all hold dear”.

I am not even going to quote the remarks of another speaker who attended the conference—Zsolt Bayer, a television talk show host in Hungary—because the language he used is not something I wish to repeat. Lord Wharton wrote an apology to staff, saying that he did not know who else was speaking and had never heard of Bayer, but that is hardly reassuring. The rest of the world can see and hear this. What conclusion does the Minister imagine it is drawing about our supposedly independent OfS?

So the OfS listens and responds to Government, but does it listen and respond to students? We have already heard that HEPI’s most recent student survey suggests a different set of priorities for students from those pursued on their behalf by OfS. The OfS will no doubt say that it has its own avenues to hear from students, but we only get answers to the questions we ask. In the most recent consultation on the national student survey, 90% of respondents told the OfS that they wanted to retain the summative question, “Overall, are you satisfied with your experience?” But out it went anyway. The majority told the OfS that they did not see the value of a question about freedom of expression, but in it went anyway.

With or without those alterations, the NSS only captures the views of final-year students—something that has contributed to both the Public Accounts Committee and the National Audit Office concluding that the OfS has an “incomplete picture” of student satisfaction. That dovetails with the evidence given in a hearing for the ongoing Lords Industry and Regulators Committee inquiry, when members of the OfS student panel said that the panel was threatened with a reassessment of its future if they continued to express views on inclusive curricula that did not conform to those of the OfS staff. Former panel member Francesco Masala said:

“we felt quite often that we were there potentially more as a tick-box exercise rather than genuinely providing active challenge”,

and that if

“you are…a representative of students, there will still be someone in a boardroom who is going to tell you what you really think and what you really want.”

Their opinion was that the OfS made decisions that were opposite to the advice and views gathered through student surveys and consultations and that it then buried the outcomes of those consultations by rolling student feedback in with feedback from all other stakeholders. That was particularly the case on freedom of speech, which they felt was a Government priority and not a student priority. Add to that the OfS’s insistence that the QAA removed students from advisory teams and we might be forgiven for asking, “What does the s in the OfS stand for?” It is unclear to many in the sector whether the OfS has sufficient expertise or capacity to meet its ever-expanding duties and operations. To make matters worse, while expanding its reach into areas where it is not needed, it appears to be falling at monitoring areas that are core to its mission.

Both the Public Accounts Committee and the National Audit Office have found that the OfS lacks an integrated system for assessing financial risk. These risks come from a multitude of external pressures on universities’ financial sustainability, such as rising pension costs, inflation in the face of frozen tuition fees, the impact of the covid-19 pandemic and the risk of Government policy or geopolitical events affecting international student recruitment. The OfS does not focus on assessing the level of risk that these systematic risks pose to the sector or our students, despite the fact that the proportion of providers with an in-year deficit, even after adjusting for the impact of pension deficits, increased from 5% in 2015 to 32% in 2019-20. Some 26% of universities forecasted at the end of 2020-21 that their cash balance would fall below 30 days’ net liquidity at some point in the next two years. Financial stress is not confined to one part of the sector: the 20 providers that have had an in-year deficit for at least three years range in size from 200 students to 30,000 students.

Universities UK has raised a number of issues with the way investigations are being undertaken, including a lack of clarity on the basis for the investigation, limited information on what a provider needs to do to comply with the investigation, the scope changing during the investigation, inconsistent methodologies when investigating similar issues within different providers, and the absence of an expected timescale with short deadlines for providers to supply large amounts of information, with delays in response to that information from the OfS. I was given one example where a single query requesting a range of data and information required 8,070 hours of staff time at a cost of £48,000, including external legal advice and a number of examples of requests for large volumes of information followed by changes in the focus of the OfS inquiry. This is undermining trust in the regulator when these requests have been felt to be fishing exercises and, of course, that adds to the time cost and burden of the work.

To conclude, we have heard from all areas of higher education, large and small, that the regulatory burden is too large and expensive. What steps will be taken to reduce it? For example, will the higher education data reduction taskforce be reconvened to assess and address data burdens across OfS and other relevant regulators, including the OfS counterparts in the rest of the UK? Fees are increasing by 13% with disproportionately higher costs for smaller institutions. Does the Minister believe the OfS provides value for money? Will the DFE consider working with the OfS to make specific provisions for smaller institutions by being less rigid in its data requirements, reforming its fee structure to reflect the number of students at an institution and improving two-way communication with the sector. As I know the Minister cares deeply about degree apprenticeships, will he look specifically at the amount of regulatory overlap required for that?

We have a political placeman as chair, constant ministerial direction of the OfS and an OfS no longer compliant with recognised international standards. How will the international standing of the UK HE sector, as one of the high academic standards of excellence free from political interference, be maintained? This country has a higher education sector that is internationally regarded as maintaining the highest academic standards and being free from politically motivated Government interference. It needs and deserves a regulator to match. I do not believe we have it yet.