Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to improve the quality of higher education courses.

We want all students, regardless of their background, to benefit from high quality world-leading higher education. The government is committed to tackling low-quality courses and ensuring that students and the taxpayer see returns on their investment and receive value-for-money.

We are taking forward significant regulatory reform with the Office for Students (OfS) to introduce a more rigorous and effective quality regime. This includes, for the first time, setting stringent minimum numerical thresholds for student outcomes, and the introduction in May 2022 of revised conditions of registration.

In March 2022, my right hon. Friend, the Secretary of State for Education and I made clear to the OfS that the government expects the OfS to step up its investigation activities through the implementation of a visible and effective on-site ‘boots on the ground’ inspections regime to be followed by robust regulatory action wherever that is appropriate. In cases where low and unacceptable quality is confirmed, regulatory action could include the imposition of formal sanctions including financial penalties and, ultimately, the suspension or removal from the OfS register, and with it access to student finance.

In addition, we have consulted on the introduction of targeted student number controls to prevent the growth of low-quality courses with poor outcomes. The consultation has now closed and we are considering the views submitted, which we will respond to in due course.

We have made clear our firm view that students must be able to expect high-quality teaching that includes face-to-face education. I wrote to Vice-Chancellors on 4 May 2022 setting out my expectation that, now the government has removed all restrictions on in-person teaching, all students should be receiving a comparable amount of in-person teaching to before the pandemic and that providers should be transparent about the sort of teaching students can expect.