An opportunity to reset the higher education environment?
This blog was authored by Bahram Bekhradnia, HEPI’s founder and President, and was first written before yesterday’s news about the Chief Executive of the Office for Students standing down at Easter 2026.
The recently published OfS Strategy states that, in addition to being ambitious and vigilant, in future the organisation will be ‘collaborative’ and ‘vocal’ in promoting English higher education as a force for good. If that really is its intention, it will represent a huge and welcome change from its past behaviour. No doubt this new approach reflects that of a new Government and Secretary of State. But this leopard will not find it easy to change its spots so suddenly.
These spots derive from the environment and ideology that gave rise to its creation. In that respect, the recent Post-16 Education and Skills white paper represents a great missed opportunity to correct one of the more egregious faults of the present regime – an ideology which underpinned the 2011 white paper and the changes that followed: the ideology of higher education as a marketplace
The 2010/11 regime, enshrined in legislation and which continues even now, is based on the notion that higher education – indeed, perhaps education more generally – is a ‘product’ and that students are ‘consumers’ of that product. And consequently, as is the case with respect to consumers of other monopoly (or monopolistic) products like gas, water, telecoms etc they need a ‘market’ regulator to protect their interests. So in the same way as we now have Ofgem, Ofwat and Ofcom, we needed an OfStud.
But even those other ‘Offices for’ recognise the need for a healthy sector and are concerned with the national interest and their sector as a whole. Not so the Office for Students, which has steadfastly avoided any concern to ensure that England has a healthy and successful higher education sector, but has focused firmly and exclusively on protecting student interests – or at least what it has perceived as being student interests.
For more than a decade, its modus operandi has been to wag its finger sternly at higher education institutions and tell them that they must do better – however well they are doing – and to say nothing to advocate for higher education. Indeed, constantly telling universities that they must do better has fed the anti-university environment fostered by previous ministers (even the previous Prime Minister spoke of ‘rip-off degrees’) and a hostile press.
The leadership of the OfS could not be expected to change its spots. New leadership was clearly required, and the replacement of the Chair represents a good start. But after more than a decade of undermining the higher education sector, it will take more than a new Chair at the top of the organisation to enable it credibly to discharge its new stated aim of being ‘collaborative’ and ‘vocal that higher education is a force for good’.
New leadership is certainly required, but beyond that, the Government needs to create a body that is more than a regulator – one that has explicit responsibility for fostering the health of the sector as a whole and ensuring that England has the higher education sector that it needs. It should reject the ideology of higher education as a marketplace, of education as a product and of students as ‘consumers’ of that product.
Comments
Paul Wiltshire says:
Why do HE advocates like yourself, dismiss any criticism as anti-university? I am against Mass HE as it is creating hundreds of thousands of graduates a year who are getting a lifelong debt, but no improved career outcomes. I don’t want all Universities to close though, I just think we need to cut numbers and introduce minimum entry standards for qualifying for student loan for a 3 year degree to around 3 B’s. The current system of Mass HE is creating far too many financial losers , who will never be able to rid themselves of an extra 9% tax levy for a degree that did them little or no good. Standing up for the ‘losers’ is surely a noble concept , and not one that should be dismissed.
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Ruth Arnold says:
Thank you for the reminder of core principles in this article. It is a really important ‘long view’. The concluding paragraph in particular can be lost in the detail.
For England to have the higher education sector it needs, we need support for students to achieve their potential and an economy and society capable of absorbing what they have to give to build good lives and improve and to make sense of the huge investment of time and money. This in turn means building capacity and global competitiveness, supporting regional economies and global attractiveness to inward investment. It means cultural richness and maintaining and building on this country as an attractive destination for talent from across the world. Education should not be beaten with an immigration stick.
That needs a joined up, long-term view, not a party politicised short-term punitive structure. Other rapidly growing economies are investing in their own future by investing in the higher education of the next generation and the innovation that will secure all those in society who need a stable economy, whether they went to university or not. If we undermine the advantage built up over decades and in some cases centuries, it won’t be recovered to all of our harm.
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David Palfreyman says:
Whatever the politics of HE regulation, hard to get away from the legal analysis that under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 (as ultimately enforced by the CMA, Trading Standards, the ASA, and the Courts – whatever the new hoped-for cuddly OfS does or does not do ‘for’ the students) – and now using the terminology of the Act – the U is a ‘trader’ and the student is a ‘consumer’ of the ‘service’ (teaching and assessment) that the ‘trader’ must provide ‘with reasonable skill and care’. Nothing new here – such has been the legal interpretation of the contractual relationship between U & S for many decades predating CRA15 (in English Law – and in ‘American Law’). A major problem is that this contract is usually one-sided in the U’s favour and sometimes even contains egregious clauses that the OfS/CMA has advised against the use of in terms of applying CRA15 – and the HE Industry has ducked for decades calls for a fair, robust, comprehensive, standardised U-S contract to educate as the basis for the S parting company with £40-50k of tuition fees as a UK UG S and up to £200k+ as an In/l S at some Us for some 4-year UG courses. It is difficult to believe that absent a rigorous regulatory regime we can trust the HE sector not to conspire against the customer…
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Jonathan Alltimes says:
“the ideology of higher education as a marketplace”. Yes. Are the contracts enforceable by the CMA? Is higher education a service? A major problem is that academic judgments are non-justiciable, so how can a judge like the ordinary reasonable man, determine if a university has provided teaching and assessment with reasonable care and skill, so that the service is (a) fit for purpose and, (b) has fulfilled its contractual promises? There is no necessary historical causality determining degree design, contractual promises, teaching and assessment, ideas about quality, student experience, and degree results. If the interpretation of the application of the case law to universities were straightforward, why does the OfS and the CMA not perform enforcements?
“Because the institutional context of the British economy encourages the acquisition of general skills and militates against sectoral coordination, its government is likely to enhance skill levels more by expanding formal education than by trying to foster sectoral training schemes modeled on the German. Conversely, competition policies that serve Britain well might erode the capacities of German firms for nonmarket coordination.” (Source: Hall and Soskice, 2001.)
Ideal types are sketches of social structures, when you do not understand the causal processes of history which brought the social structure into existence, for example the household, the enterprise or the guild. But we know the history of our universities, colleges, and the education guilds, so we do not need ideal types as explanation and certainly an ideal type is not a model to be realised.
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Kalpna says:
Great insight on the limitations of the Post-16 White Paper and how it misses a broader reset for higher education. I’ve been using https://www.studyinuk.com/ to explore UK study options and it really helps international students understand their pathways useful alongside discussions like this!
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Roger Brown says:
A number of people have discerned in the recent White Paper a switch away from the market emphasis of the past 40 years or so. However the fundamentals of the markets policy remain in place: competition between differentially resourced providers with students/graduates meeting a high share of teaching costs with limited subsidies for high cost subjects. Even the reintroduced maintenance grants are being theoretically financed by the institutions, i.e privately. Moreover, what is coming out of the White Paper is even more pernicious, with public financial support tied – through LLEs and maintenance grants – to subjects that the Government deems relevant to its industrial strategy. Not only is the ‘economic ideology of higher education’ alive and well, it has taken on a new and even more damaging form. So any celebrations will need to be very carefully calibrated.
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