left to my own devices – occasional thoughts on higher education

It’s tempting to be a little arch about the Sunday Times’ cover story last weekend.

To ponder what it says about the state of British journalism that a paper once rightly famed for its investigative journalism is now leading its front page by ‘revealing’ something that, as Jim Dickinson has pointed out on WonkHE, was covered by both that site and the New York Times nearly two years ago.  And was the subject of a National Audit Office report last year.

But that would be unkind, not least as fundamentally this is a serious issue for the credibility and status of UK higher education (as while the focus has been on English HE, that’s a crucial distinction for those of is in the UK is one that’s meaningless beyond our shores).

However, the extended pre-history to the Sunday Times’ article does perhaps raise the question of did the sector not see this kind of media storm coming?  And if not, why not.

we did

In some ways the sector did see it coming.  Following the reports and significant concerns over the last two years, there have been various sector-led responses.

In February 2024 senior figures are Buckinghamshire New University, one of the universities involved in some of the franchised provision that was the focus of negative media reporting, produced a HEPI paper setting out a range of suggested actions to the problems that were emerging with franchised provision.

July the same year saw UUK, GuildHE and CUC publish a Franchise Governance Framework, and QAA entered the lists with a substantial edition of its Quality Compass on How to stay ahead of risks in franchise provision.

no, honestly – we really did

And it’s also possible to argue that OfS saw this story coming.

In October 2022 it was blogging about how it was ‘extending its regulatory work’, in cooperation with SLC, in relation to preventing fraud on campus.

A year later it announced that one of foci of its 2024 round of ‘boots on the ground’ inspections would be franchised provision.  Though we’ve yet to see the fruits of this work in February 2024 OfS did reveal it was going to conduct a specific investigation into whether Leeds Trinity University’s sub-contractual arrangements breached OfS’s conditions of registration.

There are though questions about timeliness, given that we’ve known about this for nearly two years and there’s still little evidence of action by OfS.

history repeats itself, …

There’s a striking contrast with the eagerness with which OfS chased down the spelling and grammar hare set running by the right-wing press in 2021.  That started with a Daily Mail article in April 2021, that by June that year had resulted in OfS commissioning a review leading to a report published in October the same year.

Six months.

It’s also interesting to contrast it with something that happened in 2014.  Then, an Immigration Minister questioned the quality of provision at the London campuses of universities whose primary base was outside the capital.  That challenge came in June 2014; by December QAA had conducted and published the results of a thematic enquiry of London campuses.

Again, six months.

Franchise provision: 21 months since the first media attention, still no public evidence of action as opposed to activity.

forewarned but not forearmed?

Now of course the sector-led initiatives were always going to take time to implement.  And OfS would rightly point to it not having powers in some of the areas relating to franchising, particularly that it cannot regulate providers not on its Register (and there are proposals currently under consideration to address this).  However, it can, indeed has a duty, to regulate the degree awarding bodies involved, all of whom are on the Register.

Overall though it’s difficult to escape the conclusion that even though the sector, its providers and its agencies did see this coming their response has been too little too late.