The Office for Students (OfS) opened a consultation in February 2025 to seek views on proposed changes to entry tests for registration relating to consumer protection and governance. The consultation also set out the ways in which the efficiency of registration processes could be improved, with proposals to change the information that a provider wishing to enter the regulated higher education sector in England must submit as part of an application for registration.
The proposals were designed to create a smoother and more efficient registration process for higher education providers and enable the OfS to more easily identify and refuse registrations from providers that are not yet ready to enter the regulated sector.
The consultation set out proposals to replace four initial conditions of registration with two new initial conditions:
- Proposed new initial condition C5: Treating students fairly
- Proposed new initial condition E7: Effective governance
OfS also consulted on changes to the guidance and regulatory framework that would be needed to implement the wider proposals.
The consultation ran from 6 February 2025 to 23 April 2025. A summary of responses to the consultation is expected in summer 2025.
Our response
In our response to the proposals for the new initial condition C5:
We welcome OfS’s intention to ensure more robust protection for students. We strongly agree with the proposal to remove initial condition C3 (student protection plan) and replace this with the practical policies that govern a provider's approach to the closure of courses, campuses or provider. The proposed approach is more comprehensive and transparent, and it will better support students to make informed choices. We highlight where further clarity in the requirements of the initial condition and accompanying draft guidance would be welcome. We also highlight that there is a need to review the language used to make it clearer when a provider would be considered to have treated a student unfairly. We do not support the proposal to assess fairness based on the submission of policies and student-facing documents alone and instead encourages the OfS to consider a hybrid approach, with a requirement remaining for some narrative or supporting commentary alongside the submission of documents.
In our response to the proposals for the new initial condition E7:
We welcome the shift to a more practical and transparent approach to assessing governance arrangements at the point of registration. The new condition is more transparent in the documents that OfS will require to assess governance and offers greater clarity on the criteria OfS will use in determining whether a provider’s governance is sufficient to meet initial and ongoing regulatory conditions. We welcome the OfS’s assurances that they can offer more support to providers ahead of application, and we encourage them to consider using the opportunity of reopening the registration process to identify areas where guidance for applicant providers could be improved further, in order to reduce the burden of reviewing the large volume of documentation proposed in this consultation. We raise concerns that governing documents are unique to each provider and therefore context becomes critical in ensuring governance is appropriate. The documents-only model proposed in the consultation restricts the provision of this important context at application, likely requiring it to be submitted further in the process.
Other points we raised in our response:
- We welcome the inclusion of the business plan as an initial document in the registration requirements, as well as the flexibility proposed by OfS.
- We recommend that a period longer than 60 months be taken into consideration when assessing a provider’s track record in relation to fraud and public funds. We consider the timeline indicated to be insufficient for the effective protection of public money and the reputation of the English higher education sector. We recommend that serious incidents of misconduct which took place within the past 20 years should be considered as relevant to the assessment of a provider’s track record.
- We do not agree that the OfS assessment of sector risk should be applied to all providers uniformly. The OfS’s analysis and modelling of the financial sustainability of the regulated higher education sector in England, published in November 2024, is not reflective of the diversity of risk across providers currently paused, or planning to apply to register after 1 August 2025. The risks identified do not uniformly apply across provision and this will result in scenario planning that does not reflect real risks and resource spent of no benefit to the registration process.
- We welcome the specific reference to innovation and encourage the OfS to develop further guidance (for providers and for OfS staff) to support a better understanding of risk in innovative higher education models.
- We strongly urge OfS to consider the impact that lengthy registration processes have on the financial sustainability of providers.
- We urge the regulator to do all it can to help providers succeed by setting clear and appropriate expectations and offering timely and constructive advice on how to meet them.
Read our full response using the download link below.