Overall on access and participation in England we are where we thought we’d be back in September.
The Office for Students (OfS) is setting out what it thinks are the big risks for students, and won’t rest until it is confident that higher education providers have taken account of them, worked out their own version of the risks based on their own deep understanding of their own students, and then set a stretching but credible plan to mitigate the impacts of those risks.
In his accompanying commentary to the new guidance, OfS Director of Access and Participation John Blake dwells on the familiar theme of equality in lockstep with quality – reiterating the familiar message that students from disadvantaged backgrounds should not accept poor quality courses.
The idea of the two regulatory priorities pulling in the same direction is a good one – but we do need to be very clear, just as providers need to be in developing their own interventions, on causality and evaluation.
