The Committee has been scrutinising whether the statutory duties of the OfS are clear and appropriate, and examining the performance of England’s higher education regulator against those duties since its establishment. It has also been looking into the financial sustainability of the higher education sector and OfS’s role in relation to this.
The Committee expressed a particular interest in hearing from Alex on the experiences of new providers and specialist institutions in being regulated by the OfS, and the different business models in the independent sector. Alex drew the Committee’s attention to some of the difficulties caused by the inflexibility of OfS’s approach in certain areas, and its overreliance on data, and emphasised the importance (for any regulator) of proportionality and appropriateness to different contexts. It is essential in a voluntary system of regulation that the benefits clearly outweigh the burden, and strongly in the interests of students.
Alex also argued that the otherwise broad and disparate duties given to the OfS by the Higher Education and Research Act 2017 required an overarching vision in order to remain coherent. He noted that the Government’s original vision for the regulator had centred around widening student choice and encouraging competition, but this focus had waned in recent years. Alex proposed that it was time for the OfS to be given a new vision for its role – a mission to support the sector to expand capacity to meet the accelerating demand for tertiary education in the UK due to demographic trends, growing participation rates and international interest.
In addition to Alex’s oral evidence, IHE made an extensive written submission to the inquiry which explored some of the same themes in more detail and included a number of case studies of IHE members to illustrate key points.
It is essential in a voluntary system of regulation that the benefits clearly outweigh the burden, and strongly in the interests of students