Commenting on the report, Alex Proudfoot, Chief Executive of Independent Higher Education (IHE), said:
“This review offers a long-awaited look under the bonnet of the Office for Students (OfS), the arms-length regulator of English higher education. We are grateful we had the opportunity to directly feed into the review and supported our Student Advisory Board to do so as well.
“We welcome Sir David’s keen analysis and robust recommendations for improving the impact and efficiency of OfS six years into its work. His leadership as the new interim Chair of OfS is a clear message from Government that they expect the regulator to change, a mandate we wholeheartedly support.
“Many of Sir David's findings will chime with the experiences of IHE’s members, such as the ‘black hole’ of communications receiving no response and the seemingly endless delays in taking action on any number of issues. To coin a phrase, regulation delayed is regulation denied, or at least significantly devalued. We agree that the OfS of the future should be a more focused regulator which sets high expectations for the leadership and governance of providers, and sets a high bar for when it intervenes directly on an issue itself.
“As well as better respecting the essential principle of institutional autonomy, this focus would allow the reallocation and ringfencing of its substantial budget for the activities that only the OfS can do. The lack of transparency and any sense of urgency which have plagued the registration function since day one, and have now spread to Degree Awarding Powers, still serve as a major disincentive to investment in our higher education sector, and continue to restrict its agility and the choices available to students.
“Registration underpins everything the OfS aims to achieve, so it must receive the resource necessary to provide a service which is both rigorous and efficient. Anything less will continue to stifle growth in this critical productivity-enhancing sector. We need to end the delays which even in 2024 are regularly blocking students from accessing the funding they were promised, costing providers tens of thousands of pounds to extend partnerships, and holding back the launch of new courses designed to respond to emerging industry needs.
"We are grateful to Sir David for highlighting the longstanding concerns we have expressed on the structure of OfS fees. It’s time to end the manifest unfairness of students at smaller providers paying so much more for the regulation of the sector than others do. It cannot be right that on top of the regulatory and data burden falling disproportionately on small providers, their students also lose out from a far larger slice of the fees they pay being diverted to fund the Government's regulator, without even their knowledge or consent.
“We welcome the recommendation that the OfS should seek opportunities to involve students more directly in the governance of the OfS. Our Student Advisory Board rightly highlighted the lack of opportunity for students from small and specialist providers, and those from diverse backgrounds and courses, to engage directly with the regulator. We hope the OfS takes the opportunity to ensure that their student representation structures are more reflective of the breadth of students and study models than they have been in the past.
"While Sir David is clear in his view that the assessment of quality is integral to the OfS’s work – even proposing an expanded role for the regulator integrating elements of enhancement too – the Government should consider very carefully what might be lost if it proceeds with cutting the nations and the sector itself out of the conversation on defining quality. UK higher education is revered around the world for its quality, its standards and the collaborative methods by which it assures both. This reputation was not forged by any regulator, but a confident and collaborative OfS can build on what came before with greater transparency, more protections for students, and a dynamic approach to an ever more diverse sector to ensure that we have a higher education system fit for the future."