Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with refence to her Department's press release entitled Crackdown on rip-off university degrees, published on 17 July 2023, on which degree courses she plans to increase controls.

The department wants to ensure that all students, regardless of their background, benefit from high quality, world-leading higher education (HE) that leads to excellent outcomes.

The Office for Students (OfS) has responsibility for monitoring quality and standards and acting where there is a breach of its conditions of registration. The OfS registration condition B3 sets minimum requirements for student outcomes, including course continuation, completion and progression onto graduate employment or further study.

Where courses perform below these thresholds, the providers could face investigation, enabling the OfS to understand the reasons for their performance. If a HE provider is found to be in breach of regulatory requirements, the OfS has the power to intervene and impose sanctions.

To date, the OfS has undertaken 18 investigations in relation to student outcomes (B3) performance. The OfS will publish the outcomes of those investigations in due course and will make decisions about whether regulatory action is appropriate. The department expects the OfS to take decisive action where there has been a clear breach of B3, including, where appropriate, through the use of recruitment limits. Recruitment limits will prevent the growth of courses that do not meet minimum expectations for student outcomes, where there is no justifiable explanation for them failing to do so.

Other sanctions available to the OfS include issuing a specific ongoing condition of registration requiring an improvement in performance, financial penalties and ultimately the suspension or removal of the HE provider from the register (and with it, access to student finance).