left to my own devices – occasional thoughts on higher education

Photo by jeshoots from Freerange Stock

There are many recurring complaints in the English higher education sector about its regulator, and one of the most common is the geological timescales to which many of its processes work.

Indeed, this is something that I wrote about in February 2023 and turned to again in March last year.  But this is where still where we are.  Here.  With little discernible improvement on this issue, despite the much vaunted reset between the English sector and its regulator.

So as we’re still here, as as winter slowly gives way to spring again, I’m returning to the topic, prompted by two recent press releases: one from OfS; the other from the Scottish Funding Council (SFC).

case study one

On 4 Feb. 2026 OfS announced that Regent College’s business and management courses (awarded by Buckinghamshire New and Bolton universities) would be subject to enhanced monitoring by the regulator due to breaches of Ongoing Registration Conditions (ORCs) B1, B2 and B4.  This decision was based on a ‘boots on the ground’ quality assessment of Regent College.

OfS identified the need for this quality assessment in May 2022.  The precise grounds are not clear, but the report of the assessment suggests that Regent’s student outcomes data may have played a role in this (an archive of the OfS website suggests that the most recent student outcomes data would have related to 2020).  The quality assessment team was appointed in November 2022; the assessment ran until May 2023; and the report was published in October 2024.  Eighteen months from initiation to report.

The report of the investigation, though, was not a regulatory decision.  This didn’t arrive until the publication on 4 Feb. 2026 of the Regulatory Case Report finding Regent College in breach of all three ORCs that were investigated.  Sixteen months after the investigation report.  Three years and three months since the investigation started.  Three years and nine months since the need to investigate had been identified, an identification probably based at least in part due to data that was two years older still.

case study two

In early 2025 Glasgow University undertook, in response to an error on its part that had tragic and catastrophic consequences, an investigation of its assessment and award processes.  Glasgow uncovered a ‘systemic problem’ in this area, and it referred itself to the SFC.

SFC raised a concern relating to this case through the Scottish Quality Concerns Scheme in July 2025, resulting in QAA initiating a Targeted Peer Review (TPR) on the ‘basis of maintenance of academic standards and the potential for systemic failure in following the University’s assessment regulations’ given the finding of Glasgow’s internal investigation [p.2].

The TPR was undertaken between September and November 2025, and the report of the TPR was published in January 2026.  On the day the report was published Glasgow confirmed that it accepted all of the report’s recommendations, and the SFC announced that in addition to this it was ‘commissioning QAA to conduct a national review of the assessment and associated policies and procedures across the sector’.

Six months.

larghissimo

These are challenging times in higher education.  As a consequence, we hear a lot about the need for the sector to be more agile, fleeter of foot in its decision-making and implementation.  And while speed cannot and must not be the only criterion by which we judge decision-making, there is an undeniable need for OfS to be more agile in its actions. Indeed, 2024’s Behan review emphasised the need for an agile regulator.

Case study one is not unique.  There are other similar examples of OfS quality assessment that could cited. And of course there are other examples of this problem.

The dilatory response of OfS to the abuses of franchising.  The University of Sussex-Kathleen Stock saga.  And just two months ago OfS was accused of being ‘asleep at the wheel’ in opening an investigation into the University of Greater Manchester, 10 months after the local MP wrote to the Department of Education seeking an investigation into allegations of financial mismanagement at that university.

And case study two shows that it is possible for regulatory investigations to be initiated and undertaken in a much more timely and effective way (though both the SFC and QAA may want to reflect on the broader implications of the fact that only three years previously, and one year before the tragedy that led to the TPR, a Quality Enhancement and Standards Review of Glasgow gave it essentially a clean bill of health).

the legal turn

So why are we in this position, with a higher education regulator travelling by horse and cart in a world of cars, trains and planes?

One obvious answer is the legal context in which OfS is operating.  As we have been told repeatedly since 2018, a regulator is very different to a funding body.  This places OfS into a different legal position to its de facto predecessor HEFCE, which has significant implications for the way in which it must work. Most of which slow it down.

(It perhaps also explains the opaque, excessive and legalistic nature of OfS’s regulatory framework which now tops out at only slightly short of 1,000 pages).

And at the same time the increased willingness of some higher education providers to take, or threaten to take, legal action in response to actual or potential regulatory actions has a further chilling effect (to borrow a phrase) that will only increase OfS’s caution and reduce its speed of decision making and action.

But another issue is also in play.

the snake and the lamb

At one point in my career, I came across a senior academic leader who felt that they had a gift for coining aphorisms.  And to be fair, their self-assessment wasn’t entirely wrong.

At one meeting discussion of a particular initiative was descending the slippery slope of scope creep and over-elaboration.  The senior academic leader in question stepped into the debate to halt this, with the warning that ‘we don’t want the snake to swallow a lamb and not be able to move’.  Which had the desired effect of stunning us all, leaving the floor open for the senior academic leader to pull us back from the brink.

Talking with a colleague after that meeting, we couldn’t decide if that comment represented the apogee or nadir of that senior academic leader’s phrasemaking.  However, recalling that incident the comment does now bring to mind OfS.

the obvious

In one sense, this is a known and acknowledged issue.  Since its inception OfS’s remit has been ever expanding, in part due its own mission creep but also because of government’s insistence on piling on ever more responsibilities (e.g. academic freedom and freedom of speech) as well as flotsam and jetsam (no, I still haven’t got over the ludicrous review of spelling and grammar).

Acknowledging this, the Behan recommended a refocusing of OfS onto four key priorities, and over the last 18 months we have started to see some evidence of it (e.g. the focus on financial sustainability).  However, there is something additional, deeper going on.

the less obvious

The creation of OfS was a conscious government decision to reduce the diversity of the regulatory ecosystem of English higher education.  Instead of HEFCE, QAA and the Office for Fair Access we had OfS; and OfS itself then set about, slowly but not quietly, eradicating the small regulatory niche legislators had carved for QAA in the English sector.  While we still have the OIAHE as an independent body, English higher education regulation is now essentially a one-stop shop.

One stop shops are often treated as an unqualified good; it sometimes feels that one of the unwritten laws of higher education is that all internal reviews and external consultant reports must include a recommendation that a one stop shop be established.  ‘Consolidation’.  ‘Efficiency’.  Even, ‘synergy’ (if that’s not too noughties a word). These rationales for rationalisation are well known, alongside ‘addressing blind spots and gaps’.  It was this kind of thinking that led to the very wide set of responsibilities OfS now exercises.

And it feels likely that this is a significant part of the reason for OfS’s tendency to move with all the speed and agility of a lunar rocket progressing from its assembly building to the launchpad.

Even as/when the responsibilities and priorities are rationalised, one large uber regulator does not have the bandwidth and span of control needed.  Whisper it, but perhaps a better fit for the sector would be a more diverse regulatory ecosystem.  Rather than seek to manage the challenges of a near monolithic regulator, the government and the sector would have been better advised to manage the complexity, and interfaces, of multiple bodies with more specific, targeted responsibilities that allow them to develop expertise and be more fleet of foot.

the conclusion

Of course the English sector is now too far down the regulatory road it has chosen to be able to move on from model chosen in the 2010s.  We are stuck with trying to ensure that the choice made then works more effectively than it has to date.  In terms of the overall regulatory structure, here is where we are, here is where we’ll stay.

Nevertheless it’s tempting to regard the choice in the 2010s to narrow the regulatory gene pool as another example of the bin fire that was Conservative higher education policy in the 2010s (see also undergraduate home student funding; the abolition of student number controls; repeated 180 degree turns on international student recruiment).  And to regret the too sanguine approach of the sector to this.