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.