left to my own devices – occasional thoughts on higher education

Salford Technical College as was (now Peel Building, University of Salford)

[On 22 Jan. 2025 I was one of the three speakers at a Quality Strategy Network. This post is a version of what I said at this webinar.]

The focus today is on Sector Developments and the 2026 Regulatory Landscape.  It’s impossible to talk about the former without addressing the latter, but I’m going to focus particularly on the second half of that title.  After all, that landscape is sufficiently rugged and extensive to more than occupy the time allotted to me today.  And in doing some, I’m going to break one of my professional rules of thumb.

For too many people in universities, their starting point when thinking about external regulation and expectations is (to my mind) fundamentally flawed.

The leaping off point is ‘what does the external body say we have to do’, which usually leads to the gradual (and sometimes rapid) accretion of internal policy and process.  I’ve always believed instead that universities should start from the question ‘what do we need to do in this area to fulfil our purpose, values and objectives’; and having worked this out then check to see if this leaves gaps against external requirements, and if it does then address these.

As with all rules of thumb, it’s not perfect; e.g. it’s perhaps not the ideal starting point for a director of health and safety.  But for many if not most situations, my rule of thumb (or to be slightly pretentious, my heuristic) works well – and that includes academic quality and standards.

But I’m putting that to one side for today’s purposes, and instead I’m going to take as my starting point the demands and expectations of the English regulator.  Partly that’s because it gives me a structure for what I’m going to say.  But as importantly it reflects something about the nature of the higher education sector in England in the mid-2020s, and it involves me switching from the landscape analogy to a school-based analogy.

Following higher education’s move into the Department for Education in 2010, we’ve seen the playing out of the much-forecast prediction that this would exacerbate the tendency for universities to be treated by government as big schools rather than as the much more complex and distinctive organisations that they really are.  And as this has happened, we’ve moved from the more nuanced relationship between the sector and its regulator to, since 2018, a more rigid and directive approach.

Since its establishment in 2018 OfS has behaved as the sector’s headmaster, in a traditionalist model of that role, and over the last five years has moved ever further in that direction.

It’s in that context, then, that I’m going to break my rule of thumb on higher education regulation, and frame what I’m going to cover within what we can see in OfS’s 2025-26 Business Plan, and Edward Peck’s recent letter to chairs of governing body setting out his taken as OfS’s incoming chair on emerging sector risks.  And in doing this, there are five key areas that will, I think, be of particular importance over the coming year (or perhaps four key areas, and one wild card).

future approach to quality regulation

Of course the obvious starting point has to be OfS’s development and implementation of an integrated approach to the regulation of academic quality and standards, the first consultation on which closed last month.

There are many depressing aspects of these proposals, not the least of which is that this will be third distinct regulatory framework for this area implemented by OfS since it took responsibility for them in 2018.  And my own view is that it’s more likely than not that this approach will be as short-lived as the others implemented by OfS.  However, we deal with the world as it is not the world as we would wish it to be, and this new approach will be a central and pressing reality in the coming year(s) for all of us involved in, and who care about, academic quality and standards in higher education.

Of course we don’t yet know many of the specifics of the new approach.  Part of the coming year is going to be spent waiting for OfS to consider the feedback from the first consultation, and bring forward more detailed final proposals for a further consultation.  For reasons of personal health I wouldn’t, given OfS’s track record for timeliness, advise anyone to hold their breath waiting for this second consultation.

The first providers to be subject to New New TEF (as we’re also on our third substantive iteration of that process) will, though, undergo this in 2027-28.  Given the scale of TEF, and the historic nature of much of the core data that underpins the process, providers will need to (indeed no doubt have already) look at how they think they will fare in this revised process; consider whether, and if so how, to revise their internal mechanisms and processes to align these with delivering the type of TEF outcomes they want; and develop and start to implement the management and oversight structures for engagement with the New New TEF.

All of which will, of course, be given extra impetus, weight and pressure by the plan to link TEF outcomes to undergraduate home fee levels, and to change TEF scoring so that the overall judgment for a provider is the lowest grade they receive in TEF’s two assessment domains.  And as this focuses the mind of university executives and governing bodies, it will I suspect be for those with more direct, hands-on responsibility for managing academic quality and standards to ensure that this doesn’t lead to a loss of focus on ensuring ongoing compliance with the B conditions given the (too often overlooked) accompanying introduction by OfS of a quality risk monitoring tool.

More than enough there, I suspect, to keep providers busy.  But I’m afraid I’ve got four more significant OfS-originated developments that will occupy, if not pre-occupy, academic quality and standards professionals during 2026.

collaborative provision

As those who know me will be aware, I’m no fan of the approach that OfS has taken to regulating academic quality and standards.  It has been wrong-headed, authoritarian and ineffective; and, generally, needlessly so.  The word ‘generally’ is inserted there, as there is an exception to this.

The failure of a small number of universities to live up to their responsibilities, as degree awarding bodies, for franchised provision.

This has let down the students directly affected.  At the same time it has damaged the reputation of the sector as a whole, making more difficult the already challenging task of defending universities against attacks on the value of our educational.  It has also undermined the argument, which holds for the overwhelming majority of the sector, that universities are responsible academic bodies that take seriously and manage effectively their academic quality and standards, without the need for external regulation to threaten or deliver corporal punishment to miscreants.

So all universities engaged in the domestic sub-contracting of higher education will now be subject to the delights of an additional Ongoing Registration Condition (E8).  There are many arguments as to why the proposed approach is flawed.  We have, however, brought this on ourselves as a sector, and those universities falling under E8 will spend a significant amount of time over the coming year addressing it.

E8 only relates to domestic sub-contracting, and many universities will not engage in this while having other forms of collaborative provision that don’t fall under E8.  Such universities should, though, be paying close heed.

There is already a substantial amount of TNE taking place leading to the award of degrees by English providers, and we’re seeing many universities seeking to expand significantly in this area as part of their attempts to address the currently crumbling business model for UK higher education.  And while the suggestion that some universities look as though they are going to become ‘the central administrative hub for a network of overseas campuses without having any on-site students of their own’ should be taken as the exaggeration for effect that it is intended to be, we are going to see much more TNE collaborative provision in the coming years.

As universities, we need to ensure that as this happens the same mistakes are not made in assuring the quality and standards of this provision as have been made by some providers in respect of domestic collaborative provision.  We need to do this for our students; we need to do this to ensure we fulfil our obligations to our institutional purpose and values; and we have to do this so that should OfS ever get around to developing its oft promised/threatened increased oversight of TNE, the sector has firm foundations to resist the type of unnecessarily intrusive and ill-founded regulatory approaches evident in other areas of its work on academic quality and standards.

degree classification

The third aspect of OfS regulatory attention I think will have a significant impact over the coming year is where we are and where we are headed on the issue of degree classification.

On WonkHE David Kernohan found some reasons to be cheerful in last week’s publication by OfS of its annual report on undergraduate degree classifications, with a slightly more nuanced approach evident at various points in that report (e.g. references to ‘unobserved effects’ in relation to the proportion of good degrees awarded, rather than the blunter and more accusatory term ‘unexplained’).

However, the higher level communications on this topic from OfS remain as un-nuanced as ever, indicating that OfS are continuing to pursue this issue.  And, as David’s piece talks about, a further front in this campaign was launched by OfS last November when it published its thematic review on Bachelors’ degree algorithms.

The report takes a characteristically blunt approach to this issue, and an equally typically (over) expansive view of OfS’s role and authority, to identify approaches to undergraduate degree classification that it regards as potentially problematic.  And then require any provider intending to use these after August 2026 to notify OfS, while also introducing new requirements for more direct OfS oversight of degree classification algorithms.

This raises significant issues of principle about the respective authority of OfS and universities in relation to academic standards, as well as complex pedagogical issues about assessment and awarding.  It also potentially takes us back over a decade to the debates about whether degree classification has had its day and should be replaced by another approach.

As a result this is going to be a significant issue over the coming year(s), not just for those providers who fall foul of the lines in the sand drawn by OfS’s November report but likely for all universities.

(I’m going to side step the related issue of external examiners, which may be an important issue in the year ahead but which I’ve written about before).

governance

It feels as though it’s impossible these days to write or say anything about UK higher education, without a homily on the criticality of effective governance together with an implicit or explicit criticism that as currently practiced higher education governance is not fit for the modern world in which universities are now operating.

It’s tempting to side-step this.  To say that it was ever thus, that at any point in the last 40 years commentators could be found making such comments.  And think that this is perhaps less an issue for those of us working in the academic quality and standards field.  I have a little, qualified sympathy for the first view; the issue is at risk of being over- and/or mis-stated.  However, I think that the second aspect is in danger of being underplayed.

Of course, the sector has increasingly emphasised the need for effective engagement of corporate and academic governance activities.  The focus on this increased through the introduction of HEFCE’s Revised Operating Model for Quality Assessment, and has been continued in OfS’s Regulatory Framework.  And approaches and resources have been developed to support universities in this; e.g. in 2017 CUC published an Illustrative Practice Note on Academic Governance, and we’ve also seen helpful takes on this issue from HEPI (2022) and the Good Governance Institute (2024).

I suspect, though, that academic governance may become a more live issue in the coming year.  And given that academic quality and standards are at the heart of academic governance, this may have implications for the way we manage this area.

The evidence of the increased focus on higher education governance see are manifest and multiplying: there are a range of actions in this area in OfS’s 2025-26 Business Plan; we’ve seen the publication in the autumn of Advance HE’s Shaping the Future of HE Governance, and the Council for the Defence of British Universities’ Code of Ethical University Governance; and the Committee of University Chair’s Code of Governance is currently being reviewed and revised.  All of which is happening at the same time that the government intention to link the undergraduate home fee level to performance in TEF, draws the issue of the quality of the education university ever closer to the critical issues of institutional sustainability and survival that are at the forefront of the minds of governing bodies.

This leads to me think that it feels possible, maybe even likely, that issues of governance oversight and engagement with the types of area and work that professional quality managers engage in will be a focus in many universities over the coming year.

academic freedom and freedom of speech

Some will perhaps feel it’s a stretch to argue that governance will be a key issue in the coming year for those us engaged managing academic quality and standards in universities.  For those who do, and for some others as well, my fifth and final issue will perhaps feel like even more of a reach.  Academic freedom and freedom of speech.

I suspect that for many this will not be on your list of important academic quality and standards issues.  However, OfS has always categorised academic freedom and freedom of speech as part of its work on quality.  And while it is tempting to regard this as a crow-barring in of a topic that didn’t really fit in OfS’s scheme (or perhaps responsibilities), there may be more to it than that.

Since the government confirmed earlier this year that it would go ahead with the implementation of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, OfS has published its Regulatory Advice on Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech.  It’s tempting to think that this won’t affect the world of academic quality and standards.  I’m not so sure.

The Regulatory Advice includes explicit expectations in relation to teaching [paras. 206-07] as well as training on ‘principles of curricular design’ [para. 209].

We’ve already seen the OfS Director responsible for this area venture forth publicly on the relevance of these issues to REF, and more covertly on students funded by overseas governments – taking his remit into academic areas in ways not witnessed before.  And there is a recent instance of a pressure group seeking to make a cause celebre of one university’s attempts to embed its approach to decolonising the curriculum within core quality assurance process.

Of all the five issues I’ve plucked from the regulatory landscape, this is the one that is perhaps least likely to be regarded as key for quality management in the coming year.  But perhaps there’s some value in looking outside the more expected issues, and identifying an outlier issue we haven’t perhaps talked or thought about before.

hey! teachers! leave those kids alone

Having set out these five key features of the coming year’s regulatory landscape, it’s perhaps time to return to the starting point.

And that was to take OfS’s agenda and priorities as a starting point, in a context of what over the last seven years has been an ever more assertive and intrusive regulator.  What happens over the coming year reflects our lived reality of OfS as a regulator.  The traditionalist, ever stricter and more disciplinarian headmaster.

There is though, a changing of the guard.  A new OfS Chair in place, and new CEO to come and the prospect of seeing some reality to underpin the rhetoric since 2024 that OfS would engage more, and more constructively, with the sector.  We shall see over the coming year.