While some adjustments have been made in response to sector feedback, a number of significant issues - including links to Degree Awarding Powers (DAPs) and the approach to small data sets – have been insufficiently addressed.
The OfS has published the outcome of its consultation on a new approach to regulating quality, confirming a more standardised, data‑driven approach to the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), applied consistently across all providers. While we welcome some limited movement – including greater scope to contextualise available data – the final model does not resolve fundamental concerns raised by IHE and widely reflected across the sector, particularly in relation to smaller and specialist providers.
Key points affecting independent providers:
- Assessment limited by data: providers will only be rated where data exists, with no route to submit alternative evidence of quality, leaving some providers without ratings and limiting how performance can be demonstrated. The framework provides no meaningful qualitative route for assessing quality in providers with small or volatile datasets.
- Approach to student voice narrowed: the OfS has moved away from proposed alternative methods of gathering student input and will require providers to facilitate an independent formal student submission. This is despite well-evidenced challenges for students in small providers to engage with this approach in previous TEF exercises.
- Disproportionate impact of interventions on small providers: the link between TEF participation and wider regulatory outcomes (including Degree Awarding Powers and access to funding streams) creates a risk that “no rating” is treated equivalently to poor performance. There is no justification for the impact this will have on high quality, smaller providers.
Alex Proudfoot, Chief Executive of Independent Higher Education (IHE), said:
"For policy more than a year in the making, this is a deeply disappointing announcement which leaves critical questions from our members unanswered, while the compliance clock ticks ever closer to midnight. The ‘new’ approach to regulating quality confirmed by OfS fails to understand the generational challenge facing higher education and shows no sign of rising to the moment to support the transformation, innovation and experimentation the sector urgently requires.
"Cookie-cutter processes and metrics built for large universities do a disservice to the diversity and dynamism of the English higher education sector. TEF has never worked for small providers, but the answer to limited datasets cannot be to just not award a rating at all. This will put specialist providers and those in an early stage of development in the same position as large, established institutions who have failed to make the grade. It will also silence the student voice in a significant number of cases. Neither outcome should be acceptable.
"The Government has clearly signalled that it wants more specialisation and collaboration from higher education providers, but this 'integrated' quality system will have the opposite effect. We have repeatedly offered alternative models to better achieve these aims, but OfS has taken a year to dismiss them out of hand. This is not the way to drag an underperforming regulatory system up to the standard of efficiency, proportionality and collaboration that the sector requires.
"The truth is that small and specialist providers comprise more than half of the OfS register today, no matter how inconvenient this might be for the regulator. Growing numbers also specialise in work-based learning, yet they will have to wait for any hint of detail on how apprenticeships might be assessed. These often industry-leading and innovative institutions cannot simply be an afterthought.
"Fundamentally, we are concerned that OfS is chasing a simple solution to a challenge in which complexity is unavoidable and sophisticated regulation is what is required. Providers and students alike deserve an assessment framework which is both proportionate in its approach and generates real insights into the quality of provision on offer at all providers.
"Plans to make TEF the gateway for other benefits such as Degree Awarding Powers (DAPs) and the Strategic Priorities Grant underline the importance of getting this right. The very providers who will use DAPs to innovate and respond to fast‑changing economic needs are those most at risk if the system fails to contextualise where data is unavailable. Perhaps the technical consultation can clarify how this new approach will not discriminate against and stifle innovation, but the signs today are far from encouraging."