At 95 pages (or 438 paragraphs) long, today’s report of the House of Lords’ Industry and Regulators Committee (IRC) – Must do better: the Office for Students and the looming crisis facing higher education – is far from the bellyaching about regulation it will most likely be painted as.
There is a lot of detail present about the way in which the Office for Students (OfS) works and could work better, specifically around quality, the student interest, sector relations, and political independence.
But we also find a focus on the financial sustainability of the sector, and an examination on the way the ideas and approaches of the Higher Education and Research Act 2017 (HERA) have interfaced with reality.
The sector, it turns out, is facing existential problems in nearly every sphere of activity. And, as Lord Hollick puts it:
it was evident throughout our inquiry that the OfS is failing to deliver and does not command the trust or respect of either providers, or students, the very people whose interests it is supposed to defend.
