Tag: provision

  • Outcomes data for subcontracted provision

    Outcomes data for subcontracted provision

    In 2022–23 there were around 260 full time first degree students, registered to a well-known provider and taught via a subcontractual arrangement, that had a continuation rate of just 9.8 per cent: so of those 260 students, just 25 or so actually continued on to their second year.

    Whatever you think about franchising opening up higher education to new groups, or allowing established universities the flexibility to react to fast-changing demand or skills needs, none of that actually happens if more than 90 per cent of the registered population doesn’t continue with their course.

    It’s because of issues like this that we (and others) have been badgering the Office for Students to produce outcomes data for students taught via subcontractual arrangements (franchises and partnerships) at a level of granularity that shows each individual subcontractual partner.

    And finally, after a small pilot last year, we have the data.

    Regulating subcontractual relationships

    If anything it feels a little late – there are now two overlapping proposals on the table to regulate this end of the higher education marketplace:

    • A Department of Education consultation suggests that every delivery partner that has more than 300 higher education students would need to register with the Office for Students (unless it is regulated elsewhere)
    • And an Office for Students consultation suggests that every registering partner with more than 100 higher education students taught via subcontractual arrangements will be subject to a new condition of registration (E8)

    Both sets of plans address, in their own way, the current reality that the only direct regulatory control available over students studying via these arrangements is via the quality assurance systems within the registering (lead) partners. This is an arrangement left over from previous quality regimes, where the nation spent time and money to assure itself that all providers had robust quality assurance systems that were being routinely followed.

    In an age of dashboard-driven regulation, the fact that we have not been able to easily disaggregate the outcomes of subcontractual students has meant that it has not been possible to regulate this corner of the sector – we’ve seen rapid growth of this kind of provision under the Office for Students’ watch and oversight (to be frank) has just not been up to the job.

    Data considerations

    Incredibly, it wasn’t even the case that the regulator had this data but chose not to publish it. OfS has genuinely had to design this data collection from scratch in order to get reliable information – many institutions expressed concern about the quality of data they might be getting from their academic partners (which should have been a red flag, really).

    So what we get is basically an extension of the B3 dashboards where students in the existing “partnership” population are assigned to one of an astonishing 681 partner providers alongside their lead provider. We’d assume that each of these specific populations has data across the three B3 (continuation, completion, progression) indicators – in practice many of these are suppressed for the usual OfS reasons of low student numbers and (in the case of progression) low Graduate Outcomes response rates.

    Where we do get indicator values we also see benchmarks and the usual numeric thresholds – the former indicating what OfS might expect to see given the student population, the latter being the line beneath which the regulator might feel inclined to get stuck into some regulating.

    One thing we can’t really do with the data – although we wanted to – is treat each subcontractual provider as if it was a main provider and derive an overall indicator for it. Because many subcontractual providers have relationships (and students) from numerous lead providers, we start to get to some reasonably sized institutions. Two – Global Banking School and the Elizabeth School London – appear to have more than 5,000 higher education students: GBS is around the same size as the University of Bradford, the Elizabeth School is comparable to Liverpool Hope University.

    Size and shape

    How big these providers are is a good place to start. We don’t actually get formal student numbers for these places – but we can derive a reasonable approximation from the denominator (population size) for one of the three indicators available. I tend to use continuation as it gives me the most recent (2022–23) year of data.

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    The charts showing numbers of students are based on the denominators (populations) for one of the three indicators – by default I use continuation as it is more likely to reflect recent (2022–23) numbers. Because both the OfS and DfE consultations talk about all HE students there are no filters for mode or level.

    For each chart you can select a year of interest (I’ve chosen the most recent year by default) or the overall indicator (which, like on the main dashboards is synthetic over four years) If you change the indicator you may have to change the year. I’ve not included any indications of error – these are small numbers and the possible error is wide so any responsible regulator would have to do more investigating before stepping in to regulate.

    Recall that the DfE proposal is that institutions with more than 300 higher education students would have to register with OfS if they are not regulated in another way (as a school, FE college, or local authority, for instance). I make that 26 with more than 300 students, a small number of which appear to be regulated as an FE college.

    You can also see which lead providers are involved with each delivery partner – there are several that have relationships with multiple universities. It is instructive to compare outcomes data within a delivery partner – clearly differences in quality assurance and course design do have an impact, suggesting that the “naive university hoodwinked by low quality franchise partner” narrative, if it has any truth to it at all, is not universally true.

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    The charts showing the actual outcomes are filtered by mode and level as you would expect. Note that not all levels are available for each mode of study.

    This chart brings in filters for level and mode – there are different indicators, benchmarks, and thresholds for each combination of these factors. Again, there is data suppression (low numbers and responses) going on, so you won’t see every single aspect of every single relationship in detail.

    That said, what we do see is a very mixed bag. Quite a lot of provision sits below the threshold line, though there are also some examples of very good outcomes – often at smaller, specialist, creative arts colleges.

    Registration

    I’ve flipped those two charts to allow us to look at the exposure of registered universities to this part of the market. The overall sizes in recent years at some providers won’t be of any surprise to those who have been following this story – a handful of universities have grown substantially as a result of a strategic decision to engage in multiple academic partnerships.

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    Canterbury Christ Church University, Bath Spa University, Buckinghamshire New University, and Leeds Trinity University have always been the big four in this market. But of the 84 registered providers engaged in partnerships, I count 44 that met the 100 student threshold for the new condition of registration B3 had it applied in 2022–23.

    Looking at the outcomes measures suggests that what is happening across multiple partners is not offering wide variation in performance, although there will always be teaching provider, subject, and population variation. It is striking that places with a lot of different partners tend to get reasonable results – lower indicator values tend to be found at places running just one or two relationships, so it does feel like some work on improving external quality assurance and validation would be of some help.

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    To be clear, this is data from a few years ago (the most recent available data is from 2022–23 for continuation, 2019–20 for completion, and 2022–23 for progression). It is very likely that providers will have identified and addressed issues (or ended relationships) using internal data long before either we or the Office for Students got a glimpse of what was going on.

    A starting point

    There is clearly a lot more that can be done with what we have – and I can promise this is a dataset that Wonkhe is keen to return to. It gets us closer to understanding where problems may lie – the next phase would be to identify patterns and commonalities to help us get closer to the interventions that will help.

    Subcontractual arrangements have a long and proud history in UK higher education – just about every English provider started off in a subcontractual arrangement with the University of London, and it remains the most common way to enter the sector. A glance across the data makes it clear that there are real problems in some areas – but it is something other than the fact of a subcontractual arrangement that is causing them.

    Do you like higher education data as much as I do? Of course you do! So you are absolutely going to want to grab a ticket for The Festival of Higher Education on 11-12 November – it’s Team Wonkhe’s flagship event and data discussion is actively encouraged. 

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  • OfS consults on a condition of registration for subcontracted provision

    OfS consults on a condition of registration for subcontracted provision

    Cast your mind back to the end of January this year.

    The Department for Education proposed that all providers delivering a course via a franchise model to more than 300 students should register with the Office for Students.

    The rationale was straightforward. An increasingly large number of students were studying at, effectively, unregulated providers – with the connection to the lead provider achieved via an office in the registry and subject to varying (shall we say) levels of oversight in terms of quality, standards, and – frankly – probity (as we and others have extensively reported).

    That consultation concluded in April, and we have heard very little about these plans since. So when, just before summer recess, the Office for Students announced its own consultation on regulating franchise provision one could be forgiven for assuming that the two approaches would somehow link together.

    Information requirement

    What OfS has suggested addresses the other end of the issue – while DfE wants to register delivery providers, OfS wants to put a new condition of registration (E8) onto institutions with more than 100 students taught via subcontractual arrangements. The condition is not an arduous one – it basically suggests that a lead provider should have adequate governance and oversight of risks concerning subcontractual provision, and be prepared to share key information about these arrangements (a so-called “Comprehensive source of information”, or CSol). In return OfS can demand more information (“monitoring”) and make “directions” for the lead provider to start or stop doing stuff. All this would, consultation pending, come into force in January 2026.

    Now, it would be fair to wonder whether this kind of effective governance in the public interest is already covered in conditions E1 and E2, and the information end of things feels a little bit F3. It is neither unreasonable nor arduous to expect providers to have adequate governance or to publish information – though it is questionable (given the applicability of these existing registration conditions) that this will have any meaningful impact on provider activity.

    In other words, if you don’t have effective arrangements in place regarding subcontractual provision, you are already in breach of condition E2 and will face consequences. Just ask Leeds Trinity University, now £115,000 poorer as a result – and, as the consultation suggests, just the tip of a very large iceberg of provision where OfS has been regulating quietly behind the scenes.

    Rationale

    So why the need for E8? If providers are already required to be transparent around governance arrangements and oversight, why do we need another condition to do the same thing for subcontractual relationships? And if there are additional informational needs, or a need to limit what a particular provider can do, why not do a specific condition of registration relating to subcontractual activity? Or why not wait a few weeks to see whether DfE brings the people doing the actual course delivery into its regulatory ambit? OfS says:

    We consider that implementing a general ongoing condition of registration sends a clearer signal to the sector about our expectations for managing subcontractual partnerships now and in the future. Including our requirements in the regulatory framework in this way provides greater transparency for all providers and for other stakeholders.

    We are, once again, in the realms of vibes-based regulation: the purpose of this requirement is to make it look like OfS is finally doing something to address the problems with subcontractual provision that have been visible to the media since at least 2014.

    In the weeds

    You’ll look in vain within the consultation for any mention of OfS’ own long-promised publication of definitive data on the size and shape of franchised provision – now possibly coming in the last quarter of 2025 (following a very small pilot release last year). Where this gets interesting is the methodology for calculating where or not you are over the threshold (a total of 100 – headcount – students studying via subcontractual arrangements at relevant providers) as calculated by the OfS’ own student number methodology and that would be returned via HESES. While OfS has not yet been confident enough in this data to release it in full, it is somehow content to rely on it for regulation.

    The 100 isn’t an exact cut off: if you generally recruit more than 100 subcontractual students but happen not to one year, you are still in scope – likewise if you make changes to your plans so that you will recruit more than 100 (or are “materially likely” to do so) you are in scope already. Or if OfS decides you are in scope, you are in scope.

    To be clear, this isn’t all such arrangements. The use of the term “relevant” excludes by definition any provision in a state-funded school, FEC, sixth form, designated institution (FHEA 1992 section 28), provider of NHS services, local authority, or police and crimes commissioner. Also exempt in your calculation are students subcontracted to any provider with degree awarding powers authorised by or under an Act of Parliament or a Royal Charter (so all taught or research DAPs, basically).

    Back end

    For clarity, the traditional way in which subcontractual arrangements are regulated is via the registering provider – and these OfS proposals are an attempt to bring some of what should be going on already out a bit further into the open. The existing transparency conditions of registration (F1, which operationalises section 9 of HERA) don’t cover governing (or academic quality and standards) documentation. Indeed, OfS has been historically light on governance transparency – which is why it isn’t always easy to figure out what is going on inside a given provider.

    It’s not so long ago that OfS was lambasting providers for “gold plating” internal quality assurance processes in a long-sustained campaign to flush out those in the sector who cleave to the much older doctrines of the UK Quality Code. You know, nonsense like:

    Providers and their partners agree proportionate arrangements for effective governance to secure the academic standards and enhance the quality of programmes and modules that are delivered in partnership with others. Organisations involved in partnership arrangements agree and communicate the mutual and specific responsibilities in relation to delivering, monitoring, evaluating, assuring and enhancing the learning experience.

    A big chunk of the documentation that OfS is asking for here (in the comprehensive source of information) is basically documentary proof that a provider is compliant with principle 8 of the UK Quality code (including the QAA’s recent guidance), not that you will be thanked by the regulator for pointing this out. Perhaps some of that “gold-plating” was important after all.

    But there is one place where OfS goes further: it asks for a “strategic” rationale for entering into each subcontractual arrangement. We don’t get any guidance on what a suitable rationale would be, just that it must fit with a provider’s vision and strategic intent. Case law here is going to be fascinating.

    Front end

    From a student protection perspective OfS would gain powers to compel those franchising out provision to make changes to the terms of these agreements or the governance or process involved in running them – in extremis the regulator could require that an arrangement ends immediately, students have their fees refunded, and the registering provider steps in to teach out the remaining student. It can also tell you to stop recruiting students onto subcontracted out courses, or limit the number of students that can be recruited.

    This is a large improvement on current arrangements, which have largely been predicated on a provider having an up-to-date student protection plan and being able to deliver on it. The fee refund requirement, in particular, should make anyone that is knowingly partnering with someone offering students a sub-par experience sit up and pay attention.

    It’s not perfect, however: the January DfE proposal on franchising and partnerships was interesting precisely because it broke with established practice on subcontractual arrangements – those delivering teaching would be regulated, whether or not they were awarding the degrees in question. If OfS could intervene directly with a delivery provider, surely that would be quicker than going via the registration provider – the measures in this consultation would then be usable for purely punitive reasons (and, as above, duplicate other conditions of registration)

    OfS has followed the DfE lead in excluding most publicly funded provision from these regulations – it made sense to exclude schools, colleges, and the NHS from active regulation as they are already regulated elsewhere. If the purpose of these OfS proposals is to ensure that the universities that are subcontracting out do so with a level of strategic intent, it seems unlikely that someone is incapable of making a strategically poor or under-resourced commitment to work with an FEC or sixth form: surely these arrangements also deserve a level of scrutiny?

    And – frankly – why shouldn’t providers involved in subcontracting be required to publish information about it (rather than hold it until OfS asks for it)? The current concerns with this style of provision have developed precisely because agreements and fee-splitting agreements can remain obscure – a bit of public accountability for these kinds of decisions would do a lot to separate out the good and valuable subcontractual arrangements from the more questionable partnerships.

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  • How funding policy has affected foundation year provision

    How funding policy has affected foundation year provision

    The coming academic year (2025-26) is the first in which classroom-based foundation year (FY) fees will be capped at a level below the higher level fee cap.

    For many who have experienced or supported foundation year tuition this is a retreat from a proven method for supporting people who have been failed by compulsory schooling in continuing their education. Critics would point to a few years of sustained growth, particularly in franchised provision, that is of more questionable quality and benefit.

    Foundation years are an anomaly in that they sit neither at level three (alongside other pre-university qualifications like A levels or the Access to HE Diploma [AHED]) or level four (alongside higher national diplomas, and the first years of both undergraduate degrees and higher technical qualifications). As such, they will face the worst of both worlds: level 3 funding (for classroom-based provision) covered by level 4 repayment rules and level 4 regulatory interventions.

    Why cut?

    In a ministerial statement that, in a dazzling display of self-awareness, actually used the phrase “fix the foundations” twice, the Secretary of State set a fee limit of £5,760 (the maximum current cost of an AHED, though in practice fees are nearer £4,000) as a maximum for “classroom-based” (non-STEM) foundation years on 4 November 2024.

    There’s a paragraph on the ostensible reasoning for this that is worth bearing in mind:

    The government recognises the importance of foundation years for promoting access to higher education, but they can be delivered more efficiently in classroom-based subjects, at a lower cost to students.

    This sounds more like an access-focused intervention rather than an attempt to cut provision, although it is rather divorced from the cost of provision. This is despite a 2023 report from IFF Research which noted that, based on the available data and on a series of interviews:

    the cost of delivering FY and the first year of a UG degree in the same subject area was found to be broadly similar

    Indeed, there were suggestions that FYs may actually work out more expensive, given the need for more contact time and the tendency towards smaller classes. We should leave aside for the moment the great difficulties we have in understanding the cost of higher education provision more generally, and note that the evidence base for this particular decision is weak. And there is, to be clear, a huge absence of meaningful data about FYs more generally – something DfE itself attempted (after a fashion) to remedy with an ad hoc data release in October of 2023.

    Review of routes

    If you were wondering where the impetus for this policy intervention originally came from, you have to look back to Philip Augar’s review of post-18 fees and funding back in 2019:

    We recommend that student finance is no longer offered for foundation years, unless agreed with the OfS in exceptional cases.

    In broad-brush terms, his argument was that foundation years did a similar job to some level 3 qualifications (specifically the Access to HE Diplomas) at greater cost: he characterised this as “enticing” underqualified students onto expensive four year degrees that may not be in their best interests.

    It was one of many largely arbitrary (and mercifully forgotten) Augar recommendations on higher education funding, to the credit of the previous government it was very much more aligned to addressing the value offered to students. As Michelle Donelan said in 2022:

    We also know that there are some people who need a second chance, an opportunity to get into higher education through a less conventional route. Often this route is through foundation years, but we think it is unfair that some of those who take advantage of this transformational opportunity have to pay over the odds. So we are reducing the fee limit for foundation years to make them more accessible and more affordable for those who need a second chance.

    Quantity and quality

    Okay. So, ignoring Augar, there’s never been an agenda to cancel or limit the availability of foundation years. The cuts are based (albeit on some quite shaky data) on reducing costs for students while maintaining affordability for providers.

    There is, however, widely reckoned to be a quality issue with some FYs offered via franchise or partnership arrangement – something which DfE did not appear to have considered in collecting data or commissioning reports.

    With the 2025 recruitment cycle mostly over, we now have the ability to assess how the sector has responded to these interventions via the Unistats dataset.

    As I never tire of telling people, Unistats is not perfect but it is useful. The big headline story we’ve tracked in recent years is a reduction in the number of undergraduate courses on offer overall – down 6 per cent between 2023 and 2024, and down a further 3 per cent between 2024 and 2025.

    Foundation supply

    But underneath this we lost one in ten courses with compulsory foundation years (courses that must start with a foundation year) between 2023 and 2024, and a further five percent between 2024 and 2025. The latter year also saw nearly 6 per cent of optional foundation years (courses that can include a foundation year if required) disappear.

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    What about franchise provision? Using a unistats proxy (does the registered UKPRN match the display UKPRN, or is there an additional UKPRN for a different teaching location) it appears that the number of franchised compulsory foundation years grew from 90 in 2023 to 107 in 2024. This trend reversed between 2024 and 2025 (with numbers falling back below 80), but the number of optional franchised foundation years fell off a cliff after 2023: from 53 in 2023 to just 12 in 2024, and 13 in 2025.

    At a (top level) subject area the dominance of social sciences and business foundation years has declined a little – engineering foundation years have always been popular and have broadly persisted over the three years in question (and are the most popular by far at Russell Group providers). Among franchised provision business and management still dominates, but the last three years has seen a rise in the number of creative and engineering foundation years offered (largely with specialised providers as franchisers).

    Policy outcomes and policy intentions

    So, it all depends on how you take the impetus of the government’s change in foundation year policy. If it was a measure to reduce overall the number of classroom (non-STEM) foundation years it has had some questionable success, likewise if you believe it was a policy designed to limit the spread of franchised foundation year degrees.

    It is possible that it has driven savings within universities – allowing foundation years to be run more cheaply. This might explain things like the paradoxical rise in franchised foundation years in creative arts alongside a drop in non-franchised provision – smaller and less historically encumbered (and potentially lower quality) providers may be better at running these foundation years at a lower overall cost.

    Here’s who is offering these courses – and what they are.

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    This defaults to FY provision in 2025 but is – with a bit of effort, a fascinating tool for looking over the complete three years of courses advertised to undergraduates.

    As usual, we are hugely short of data – the fact that unistats (of all things) offers the best lens on what is happening suggests that there’s nobody in DfE with an eye on what is going on.

    But rumours of the demise of the classroom based foundation year, or even the franchise model in providing this, are likely to be overstated. It remains to be seen, by whatever measure, whether the cut-price offer is as good.

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  • Regulating partnership provision can help everyone

    Regulating partnership provision can help everyone

    On a Monday morning in late March, ninety strangers sit down together at the base of one of the towering pillars of glass and steel that pierce the spring blue skies of the City of London to talk about collaboration.

    This was no ivory tower. At mixed tables across the room sat the emissaries of universities old and new, adult community colleges, specialist institutes and industry training centres – awarding providers, teaching providers, and sector bodies too.

    Partners for the day, they heard from sector experts about the latest developments in the policy and practice of academic partnerships and then translated what they learned into their own institutional context through lively and productive small group discussions.

    You might think that the previous day’s headlines would not have made for the most auspicious backdrop to proceedings, but if anything they instilled in the participants of IHE’s first annual Academic Partnerships Conference a clarity of purpose and an impassioned defence of the genuine importance and transformational value of high-quality collaborative provision.

    Not all partnerships! The silent cry went up. And not all franchises either.

    The value of partnership

    Let’s be absolutely clear: academic partnerships are nothing new in higher education. England’s oldest universities – Oxford, Cambridge, London – are themselves nothing less than partnerships in motion, organisational structures evolved to facilitate collaboration across a number of independent self-governing institutions. Academic partnerships have remained the irresistible engine for the expansion of the UK’s higher education sector, driving wider access, greater diversity and more innovation in provision even while the specific models have continued to adapt to changing contexts and circumstances.

    Today, fantastic examples of successful partnerships can be found everywhere you look and they can just as easily take the form of a validation agreement as a subcontractual relationship (aka franchise). While Degree Awarding Powers rightly remain a gold standard, many independent higher education providers would rather dedicate their precious time and focus towards the teaching, learning and industry knowledge exchange that forms the heart of their missions.

    Partnerships should be prized and protected for their essential role in delivering higher education provision which responds to local, national and sector-specific needs. Let’s not forget that different groups of students with different backgrounds and different learning goals benefit enormously from higher education delivered through partnerships. We ignore their needs at our peril.

    So everything is really fine? Move along, please, nothing to see here? Not quite. At IHE we are under no illusions that everyone in our sector has the same good intentions. It can be all too easy for those of us who work in higher education to believe that we are immune to some of the problems that rear their heads in other sectors. Sadly not. Education is a public good, a universal good, an elemental ingredient of civilisation, but this truth can make us naïve, obscuring the loopholes that still exist and the risks that operating in such an open system built on trust can create.

    Regulating partners

    IHE shares the Government’s ambition to strengthen oversight of subcontracted delivery that underpins DfE’s proposals but the proposals themselves miss the mark, as set out in our response to the consultation. If we are serious about doing this, then there are five areas of focus to which we must turn our collective attention – and fast:

    • due diligence on every provider’s suitability as a partner, and the fitness and propriety of their management and governance;
    • transparency on ownership and the terms of any contract for provision;
    • accountability which is clearly assigned between each partner for the critical aspects of provision;
    • quality and standards which are managed effectively by the relevant partner at the appropriate level; and
    • flexibility in any oversight process so that we continue to facilitate the full range of diverse providers with something different to offer the higher education sector.

    The absolute and non-negotiable starting point for an effective regulatory system must be that the regulator knows who is really in charge of every provider it regulates, and to be able to hold them to account. Ambitions aside, the OfS needs to be far more effective at identifying and keeping out individuals who are simply not fit and proper persons to share in the honour and responsibility of stewarding an English higher education institution.

    Thankfully, the OfS proposals under consultation to strengthen its conditions of registration in relation to governance and student protection signal a new seriousness in its approach to this challenge – and are long overdue. The regulator is on the right track with its plans to take a much closer look at ownership, and in trying to identify unfair and inappropriate practices in relation to student recruitment and admissions.

    Any institution in the business of academic partnerships should be taking a close look at these reforms. These are issues that are important to everyone with a stake in the success of the higher education sector. It is in the entire sector’s interest, in the public interest – and nobody’s more than students’ – that the regulator carves out a constructive and collaborative role for itself in this space, helping to facilitate the positive impact of partnerships while minimising the risk of criminal elements exploiting vulnerabilities in the system.

    Rethinking registration

    But could the OfS go further? What if there was a new approach to registration? A category explicitly intended for providers operating in partnership, designed to fill the gaps in oversight that universities cannot on their own, while letting them lead on the academic quality assurance that is their forte. A process built from the ground up to secure the most essential assurances, that can be proportionately applied to different sizes of institution, and efficiently delivered against clear timetables and stretching service standards.

    A paradigm shift towards expecting every would-be delivery partner to complete such a due diligence process could, at a stroke, drive up standards of transparency and ethical behaviours, and better protect genuine students and the public purse from the threat of academic predators. Only a statutory regulator can really achieve this, with its access to intelligence from other public authorities. There is no reason why an awarding institution would not require a potential delivery partner to undertake this process prior to approving their first course. Indeed a centralised due diligence process delivered efficiently at scale could be used to streamline and speed up a partner’s own institutional approval processes.

    At the same time we in the sector’s leadership should be working at pace with all stakeholders on the development of a better shared understanding and greater mutual agreement over what constitutes the most effective policies and practices in partnership provision. The absence of sector-wide standards or accepted best practice in this area, combined with higher education’s generally held principles of transparency being too often trumped by commercial sensitivities, are what has allowed pockets of poor practice and a risk of exploitation by bad actors to grow unchecked by effective regulation.

    Simply requiring providers of an arbitrary size to register with the OfS without any critical analysis of the proportionality or effectiveness of current regulation will not achieve our aims and could easily make matters worse. Even the failure of one significant delivery partner to pass the ill-fitting regulatory hurdles set under the current proposals – let alone, say, a dozen – would create extreme jeopardy for thousands of students and place the system as a whole under unbearable pressure. We will sleepwalk into this situation if we do not change course.

    It would be far better to make awarding institutions properly accountable for the policies, practices and performance of their delivery partners now, while giving them the regulatory tools to help them achieve more effective oversight, than to create a new Whitehall bureaucracy with a single point of predictable failure as DfE’s proposed designation gateway does. Far better to create a dedicated process focused on a deeper due diligence which properly accounts for the actual strengths, vulnerabilities and diversity of partnership models.

    Academic partnerships are here to stay. A flexible, proportionate and efficient process which applies regulatory scrutiny where it is most needed can offer a foundation for sector-led efforts to enhance the quality, transparency and consistency that students should expect.

    We all have a part to play. And we need to get this right. It is essential for the reputation of the higher education sector that we do. As partners in this collective endeavour, it is time for us to shine a light on this invaluable work that has spent too long in the shadows.

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  • How do you get from skills planning to effective learning provision?

    How do you get from skills planning to effective learning provision?

    For countries, regions and organisations across the UK and globally linking learning and skills has been a perennial problem. Employers and governments talk about skills gaps and shortages and look to education and skills providers to plug them. If it were that simple, gaps would be plugged already – so what gets in the way? And how might we create the conditions to overcome challenges and build a system that works?

    Through the Regional Tertiary Pathfinders programme the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) worked alongside enterprise and skills partners and colleges and universities to take a “learning by doing” approach to finding out how Scotland’s tertiary education and skills system can be made more responsive, more integrated, and better able to support regional economies.

    Seven pilot projects operating in the North East and South of Scotland helped us do just that, providing a real-world opportunity to learn from their work to deliver quick improvements. We are grateful to all the people in colleges, universities and regional organisations that have been involved along the way.

    The projects are delivering changes in their curriculum, course offer and marketing materials which will have positive impacts for learners, improving the information on which they base their choices, smoothing and supporting learner journeys and pathways, and enabling them to progress into key areas of employment in the region or beyond.

    Working regionally and as part of the programme, the education partners involved – three colleges, three universities and a tertiary institution – have been able to test how best to deliver ‘“next level” collaboration and together determine how best to achieve a shared local understanding of issues and needs.

    The programme has also enabled us to test what collaboration across the two halves of tertiary provision might look like. Too often people think tertiary means merging colleges and universities – it might, but there are other models. We’ve been able to see new forms of shared governance develop, pursuing a greater emphasis on a systems approach which moves to lower, blur or remove some institutional boundaries.

    Learning from experience

    As one of the Pathfinder participants told us: “Defining what is different about the approach is important, it’s not just a talking shop; it’s about getting things done and meeting the needs of our young people and industry and for the region.”

    The programme has been rich and multidimensional, providing insights at a project, regional and system level. I can only provide a flavour of the learning here with much more specific and practical learning contained in the reports, videos and other resources published on the Scottish Funding Council’s website.

    At a programme and system level the factors for success have been:

    Creating the right conditions for collaboration. It is important to have the right governance structures to facilitate effective collaboration with clear roles and responsibilities for development and delivery. It is also crucial that senior leaders provide the authorising environment for the work and are seen to be actively involved and supportive.

    Working together differently. This was made possible by focusing on joint curriculum development, shared resources, and regional agreement on shared priorities. It enabled institutions to collaborate to create more effective learner pathways, courses and information products. Examples from the programme demonstrate how deeper, sustained partnerships between colleges, universities, and employers contributed to more dynamic and responsive education models, providing benefits to both learners and the regional economy.

    Different models of collaboration. Formal institutional agreements emerged and provided long-term stability, while informal partnerships allowed for flexibility and adaptability in responding to emerging regional demands – and both provided opportunities for collaborations to grow and deepen into new curriculum areas.

    Skills planning partnerships operating to influence the successful development of learning provision. It is vital that there is a clear and coherent approach to accountability so there is clarity about the roles and responsibilities of various stakeholders within existing regional and local partnership planning fora in developing and delivering regional skills priorities and associated provision.

    Improving communication channels and formalising responsibilities ensures all partners understand their contributions to skills planning, enabling more effective alignment between educational pathways and regional economic needs. To enable more cohesive skills planning across sectors and partnerships, educational institutions should be empowered to lead skills responses – effectively using their brokering role to plan across multiple local authority areas and partnerships within a region.

    Supporting long term success

    Spreading and sustaining impact will be important as we move from programme to business as usual. Some key features which support both project and longer-term success include:

    Inter-regional collaboration: A consistent feature across all projects was the collaboration between institutions in different localities, aligning their programmes and resources to serve the broader region. This approach has not only reduced duplication but also created more cohesive learning pathways. Expanding this model to other sectors and regions offers the potential to improve coordination, ensuring consistent and accessible educational opportunities across local authorities.

    Recognising the role of the project co-ordinator: The project co-ordinator played a critical role in ensuring project success by facilitating collaboration, engaging the right stakeholders, and maintaining continuous progress. The success of this role demonstrates its potential to be scaled and adapted for use in other projects, ensuring smooth facilitation of partnerships and sustained momentum in multi-institutional collaborations.

    Data sharing and collaborative analysis: Several projects benefited from data-sharing agreements that allowed institutions to analyse application and enrolment data together. Shared analysis helped align recruitment strategies, improve learner outcomes, and enhance marketing efforts. The model of using shared data to drive collaborative insights and decision-making can be scaled to other institutions, sectors, or regions, offering a framework for improving alignment between educational programmes and market needs.

    Cross-institutional dialogue at multiple levels: A key feature of projects was regular dialogue between senior leaders, heads of departments, and professional service teams (including recruitment, admissions, and marketing). This dialogue enhanced collaboration at multiple levels, ensuring that institutions were aligned in their goals and activities. The multi-level dialogue model can be adopted by other institutions aiming to build closer working relationships across departments and leadership levels.

    Sustaining collaboration

    My list for enduring skills partnerships includes:

    • Developing a shared understanding of how to work together within the learning, skills and economy regional planning structures.
    • Avoiding over-reliance on individual relationships, which can be put at risk due to staff turnover. Take a systems-based approach instead – there is a role for the Scottish Government and SFC in creating the conditions for the system to work effectively.
    • Recognising there is an institutional cost associated with co-ordination and appropriately resource the partnership element of the work.
    • Having a dual focus on doing things together and maintaining the relationships that underpin joint delivery.
    • Obtaining meaningful buy-in from leaders at all levels, to enable and encourage staff to take the time required to build relationships and explore opportunities for deeper collaboration.
    • Discussing and agreeing attitude to risk – how open are partners to exploring and testing innovative solutions?
    • Including regular review points (as built into the Pathfinders programme) where partners step back and review, reflect and adapt together.
    • Facilitating better liaison with employers. For example, encourage more industry engagement in curriculum for a wider range of work-based learning opportunities.
    • Improving data sharing, e.g. Create central data sharing agreements to reduce institutional burdens, and have overarching tracking data for all.
    • Continuing to ask the questions:
      1. How far will our proposals meet learner, employer and societal needs?
      2. To what extent will they enable us to cope with increasingly tightening budget settlements?

    A project lead told us: “What makes the approach successful is being really clear about what we’re trying to achieve; using action plans for delivery means people own the actions and the outcomes; they can see that the outcomes will make a real difference to learners, college staff, employers and employees and make life easier for business providers in the region.”

    We want colleges and universities across Scotland to be inspired by what we’ve learnt through this programme and to use the Pathfinders resources to see what is possible. I hope the lessons learned (things to do, and things to avoid!) can be used to roll out a new approach more widely. The Pathfinders are an example of policy making as bottom-up, action-based research.

    The full suite of Pathfinders reports is now available Regional Tertiary Pathfinders – Scottish Funding Council.

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