WEEKEND READING: Before saying yes: the missing test in provider exit

This blog was kindly authored by Professor Randall Whittaker, Principal and Chief Executive Officer at Rose Bruford College.

When a higher education provider closes, the first question is obvious: where will the students go?

There is another question, usually asked with less clarity:

Why should our institution be the one to receive them?

That is not a selfish question. It does not diminish our responsibility towards students whose education is suddenly at risk. It is the question a governing body must answer before making a commitment that may shape its institution for years.

In 2022, Rose Bruford College accepted responsibility for around 260 students following the sudden closure of The Academy of Live and Recorded Arts (ALRA). The College grew by nearly a quarter almost overnight. Rose Bruford’s specialist expertise made it an obvious academic fit. Few institutions were in a position to offer a solution for all those affected. The students continued their studies and completed them successfully.

The decision was made before I joined Rose Bruford. I inherited its long-term consequences, and much of my work since has been to understand them.

We have learned a great deal.

The most important lesson is that receiving displaced students is not an admissions exercise. It is a major institutional intervention. Another institution’s unfinished educational obligations, financial exposure, operational complexity and future regulatory consequences do not disappear. They move.

Our regulatory framework does not yet recognise that clearly enough.

Why are we doing this?

A governing body should begin with purpose.

Is receiving the students consistent with the institution’s mission? Does it have the right academic expertise? Is there a financial opportunity? Has the regulator approached it? Is nobody else willing? Or does saying no feel impossible when students are at risk? Several of these things may be true. But they are not interchangeable.

An institution may be the most willing to help without being the best equipped to absorb the transfer. It may be academically compatible but lack the financial headroom, infrastructure or management capacity required. A larger provider may have greater resources but be unable to preserve the specialist education the students were expecting.

The real question is whether the institution can carry the full responsibility without creating unacceptable consequences for the displaced students, its existing students or the institution itself. That is the first test. It needs an evidence-based answer.

Closure is not an event

Recent research from the Office of the Independent Adjudicator makes an important point: students experience closure as a process, not an event. The effects may begin before formal closure and continue long afterwards through disrupted study, damaged confidence, difficulty securing references and a continuing sense of uncertainty. Completion alone does not tell us whether students were properly protected.

The same is true for the receiving institution. The transfer may happen in a matter of days. The educational responsibility can last for years.

Students do not arrive as one neat cohort with identical needs. They bring different courses, regulations, records, expectations and completion dates. Some will require reassessment. Others will interrupt their studies or need additional time. The receiving institution may be asked to deliver a curriculum it did not design and meet expectations it did not create.

In specialist performing arts education, that responsibility cannot be understood by counting modules or conventional teaching weeks. Productions, rehearsals, showcases, technical preparation and performance assessments are part of the curriculum. They require specialist staff, spaces, equipment and external relationships.

The transfer date is only the beginning. The receiving institution needs to understand what it must deliver until the last student completes, not just what is required to enrol the cohort on day one.

The receiving institution must map that obligation to the last student, not the average student.

Student protection includes the receiving institution

Student protection and institutional sustainability are sometimes discussed as though they compete with one another. They do not. A transfer that places unsustainable pressure on the receiving institution does not offer displaced students a secure long-term solution. It may also affect the students already studying there.

Existing students do not become less important because another group has experienced a crisis. They will feel the effects if teaching space becomes harder to access, specialist facilities are stretched, staff workloads increase, support services face additional demand or planned investment is postponed.

This must not become a competition between two groups of students. A credible solution has to protect both.

Testing the capacity of the receiving institution is therefore part of student protection. It cannot be treated simply as a private financial concern for the provider to manage after the transfer has taken place.

The financial impact is real

A large transfer can have a material financial impact on the receiving institution.

The initial financial model will usually include fee income, additional teaching, student support and perhaps new premises. These are the most visible costs. They may not be the most significant.

The receiving institution may also need to deliver a curriculum designed elsewhere, secure specialist staff and facilities, replace premises or equipment that do not transfer, and expand its academic administration and professional services. There will be demands on senior management and governance, continuing support for students who interrupt or require reassessment, changes to systems and data, and pressure to postpone investment elsewhere.

An institution can make a transfer work in the short term by stretching its existing capacity. Teaching continues. Students progress. The immediate intervention appears successful. But the pressure surfaces elsewhere. Investment is delayed, infrastructure deteriorates, staff absorb additional work and cash is used to sustain activity expected to be temporary. The cost becomes visible gradually rather than appearing in one convenient line in the transfer budget.

A transfer that works only because the receiving institution quietly absorbs the consequences is not cost-free. The cost has simply become harder to see.

In Rose Bruford’s case, the gross cost of receiving the displaced ALRA students and managing the long tail of the transfer has been £2.9 million. After the financial support received, the net cash cost to the College has been £1.9 million.

Assumptions are not assets

A rapid transfer will inevitably depend on assumptions.

This may include the belief that premises will remain available, staff will transfer, records will be accessible, equipment will be secure, fee income will follow the students, teaching and assessment will conclude within a defined period.

Some of those assumptions will be wrong.

This does not mean that receiving institutions should sit waiting for perfect information. In an emergency, perfect information will not exist. It means being clear about what is known, what is assumed and what happens if an assumption fails.

There is a particular danger when decisions are made quickly. An assumption appears in an initial proposal, is repeated in subsequent papers and gradually acquires the status of fact.

Agility does not reduce the need for due diligence. It increases it.

The receiving institution must test its capacity against the downside scenario, not only the preferred one. Those supporting the solution should examine the same evidence with equal care.

Record what has been agreed

Emergency arrangements often depend on assurances about funding, future regulation, data, premises or continuing support.

Those assurances need precision. What has been promised? Who has made the commitment? What period does it cover? Is it a guarantee, an intention or an expectation? How will costs be assessed? What evidence will be required? What happens if circumstances change? The governing body must understand the basis on which it is making its decision.

People move on. Institutional memory fades. Documentation may be incomplete. People present at the same meeting can leave with different understandings of what was said. If the assumptions change materially, the arrangement should be formally reconsidered. It should not depend on the parties reconstructing an urgent conversation several years later.

Data has a very long memory

The operational transfer eventually ends. Its effect on institutional data may not.

Transferred students can remain in measures of continuation, completion, graduate outcomes and student experience for years. Those measures may later inform regulatory assessment, funding decisions and public perceptions of the receiving institution. This is not an argument for removing a cohort whenever its outcomes are inconvenient. The students became part of the receiving institution, and their outcomes matter. But an exceptional transfer should remain identifiable.

The treatment of the cohort in future data and assessment should be considered when the transfer is agreed. Can the students be reliably identified? What contextual information will be retained? When might disaggregation be appropriate? How will the intervention be considered in future judgements about institutional performance?

These questions should not be left until the next assessment exercise. By then, the people who understood the transfer may have left and the data may be much harder to interpret.

Our market-exit framework needs another test

The current policy debate rightly focuses on financial sustainability, stronger governance and protecting students when provider exit occurs. The Government has recognised that some institutions may leave the market and that intervention should protect students and taxpayers.

But the present framework remains too focused on immediate resolution.

Have the students found somewhere to go? Has teaching resumed? Has a disorderly closure been avoided?

These are necessary tests but they are not enough. There must be another:

Has the intervention created a sustainable outcome for the students and for the institution receiving them?

That question cannot be answered on the day of transfer. It must be considered before the decision and reviewed afterwards.

A receiving-provider impact assessment

Before any substantial emergency transfer is endorsed, there should be a Receiving Provider Impact Assessment.

It should provide a clear and shared assessment of four things:

1. Purpose: Why is this institution the right receiving provider, rather than simply the available one?
2. Educational responsibility: What exactly is being transferred, and when will the last realistic obligation be complete?
3. Institutional impact: What are the financial, operational and academic consequences under both the expected and downside scenarios?
4. The long tail: How will the transfer be reviewed and treated in future data, funding and regulatory assessment?

The receiving institution’s governing body should own the assessment, but it should not produce it in isolation. Where the regulator, government, validating bodies or others are involved in constructing the solution, everyone should understand the assumptions, assurances and allocation of risk.

There should then be formal reviews every six months until the final cohort completes, followed by a further assessment after the transferred students have passed through the principal regulatory datasets.

That would allow the sector to judge success by more than the fact that students moved and teaching restarted.

What Rose Bruford learned

Rose Bruford stepped forward because students needed a solution and the College believed it could provide one.

We must also be candid. The assumptions we made should have been tested more rigorously. The decision needed to look further beyond the immediate transfer, and the College’s capacity should have been scrutinised more deeply. Urgency explained the pace. It did not remove the institution’s responsibility for the decision.

That does not mean helping was wrong. It means that good intentions and academic compatibility are not enough. The sector needs institutions willing to help when students face the sudden loss of their education. But a framework that relies too heavily on goodwill, speed and institutional optimism may eventually make capable providers less willing to step forward.

A rapid transfer is not a successful market exit if it protects displaced students today by weakening the institution receiving them tomorrow. So, before saying yes, start with the question that is easiest to overlook:

Why are we doing this, and are we genuinely the right institution to carry everything that follows?

The answer may still be yes.

But it must be a yes that the institution can govern, fund and deliver long after the immediate emergency has passed.