Join Professor Sir Les Ebdon, former Director of the Office for Fair Access (OFFA) and former Vice Chancellor of the University of Bedfordshire as he reflects on the year of the Office for Students and provides some pre-Christmas considerations for our members to mull / wine on!
Few circulars from a regulator have caused as much dyspepsia as the October circular letter from the Office for Students (OfS) entitled ‘Compliance with regulatory deadlines’ did amongst Vice Chancellors in our oldest universities. It was not so much that the idea of sanctions for those who miss the regulator’s deadlines was unreasonable even if the actual sums suggested were rather draconian. It was that here was the final proof, if ever that was needed, that the comfortable relationship those older universities had previously enjoyed with the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) was gone forever.
The replacement is a regulator that expects strict adherence to direction and is quite prepared to put the esteemed head of an institution on the ‘naughty step.’
The tone of the letter, which failed to acknowledge the difficulties that OfS itself had faced in meeting their own timetable for responding to institutions, was a firm reminder that one world had disappeared, and another had arrived which was not as convivial.
I know well from my former time as the regulator of access to higher education that late returns from institutions can be inconvenient. At OFFA we often found that there was a reason for non-compliance and often a conversation would identify and resolve difficulties. Above all we found that cooperation elicited far more help for students than confrontation. Those days have passed and providers need to adjust to a new order.
For all their chundering and reminders to Sir Michael Barber that he promised a regime of ‘light touch regulation”, large universities will adapt to this new world. They have the resources and hence depth and quantity of staff necessary to meet the substantial demands of the new regulatory regime. Small, specialist and new providers will struggle more to meet the many requirements of OfS to the tight deadlines now being imposed. I am particularly concerned that this will impact adversely on attempts to broaden participation in higher education.
The new emphasis being placed on evaluation of data and effectiveness of Access and Participation Plans demands considerable expertise that is difficult to supply in house by smaller providers. At first sight it represents a formidable barrier to the entry of new providers into the ‘fee cap’ regulated group of HE providers. I have long advocated that some kind of shared service or provision is the best way of providing this in such circumstances, even better if it can be supplied by acknowledged experts in the field and adopt the collaborative approach that has been a feature of best practices in access and participation activity for so long.
Collaboration will also enable similar institutions to benchmark themselves against each other as well as national benchmarks, while preserving appropriate confidentiality. Small and specialist providers exist in a highly competitive environment but their specialist niches and unique characteristics mean they can better navigate, or completely mitigate, competition as between themselves. There is, therefore, a logic to cooperating through a respected third party so as better to meet the onerous requirements of regulation. Of course this has now become a reality with the SEER service, of which I am a champion and into which I am providing advice. Indeed I am delighted to be contributing my “Digests” to the first of these newsletters, as part of SEER. My hope is that more collaborative service provision will particularly assist small, specialist and newer providers to weather the storm and indeed add real value to those institutions and the services that they provide to their students.
Back to the regulatory landscape: When the first letters and Regulatory Notices began to appear from OfS, there was a hope that things would soon calm down. Here was a new kid on the bloc who had to sound tough to be taken seriously. That I understood, as I did exactly the same when I first became a Vice Chancellor and also in my early days at OFFA. The aim of such an exercise is so that one can then be a little more conciliatory in future because everybody understands you are serious. We have yet to see that change in attitude from OfS and it seems that they mean to carry on as they started. Across the whole sector now HE leaders and managers are beginning to respond to this new way of doing things. It will require attention to detail and to deadlines. You will not be assisted by a named contact who you can call at the regulator’s offices to help explain the finer points of detail or who indeed will come and visit you as part of a framework of support to understand your particular context and challenges. And, while we are yet to see the detail of the required monitoring, reporting and impact assessments, we can only assume that the approach to ongoing monitoring will be consistent with the current milieu.
All these matters are not helped by the current political and economic uncertainty in the country.
If the Conservatives are given the majority that they crave, perhaps a new HE Minister will attempt to reign in OfS, or at least encourage it to be a little more diplomatic. Success for one of the many threatened Judicial Reviews over registration refusals might have the same effect. Clearly a ‘Corbyn Government’ would struggle to see a role for the regulatory approach to HE if fees and the marketisation approach are dropped, although given the Scottish experience of travelling along this road strong controls to ensure widening participation is promoted would still be needed. It may be that some of the major irritants for the sector in terms of waiting for OfS decisions or guidance will resolve after the election naturally.
In a pre-election period arms-length bodies such as OfS are not supposed to make any announcements which might impact upon the election. Many regulated providers who intend to change to ‘fee-cap’ status are rightly impatient to discover what the change process might be, could this have been held up in pre-election purdah? Similarly when will we find any clarity as to what is expected in an Impact Report (the replacement for the former monitoring return on an access agreement). I hear that we should expect an analysis of existing Access and Participation Plans (APPs) by the end of January; frustratingly just too late to inform submission of APPs covering the period 20/21 to 24/25.
So what is a provider to do amidst so much uncertainty?
Carefully controlling costs and increasing efficiency are two obvious top tips and I have suggested some ways of doing that above particularly for small, specialist and new providers. My other top tip would be recruitment and maximising effectiveness in this area. While fees may go down in the next Parliament, there is no scenario where I see them going up. So to maintain income in real terms, student numbers must rise and even universities with strong brand recognition appreciate this.
What they may not realise is that with well over 50% participation of young people from advantaged backgrounds in HE, the best growth prospects are amongst the groups who traditionally do not have high levels of participation.
This requires a sophisticated and long-term approach to addressing a complex problem; one with systemic challenges. Again it will require strategic collaboration and nuanced understanding of the complexities in raising participation – and before that, stimulating interest – from these targeted groups.
This is perhaps a conversation for my next Digest, or one which you can continue with SEER /Applied Inspiration more broadly.
In the meantime, let me wish you a very Merry Christmas and I’ll see you again in the New Year.