In this blog, we highlight the important role that Alternative Providers of Higher Education (‘Alternative Providers’ or ‘APs’) can play as partners to traditional universities.
Alternative Providers are described by HESA as higher education providers who do not receive recurrent funding from the Office for Students (previously HEFCE) or another public body and who are not further education colleges. In order to be able to deliver higher education level provision, Alternative Providers have to rely on an existing provider with Degree Awarding Powers to authenticate their provision and courses. This is in the form of a validation or franchise agreement.
The Alternative Provider (‘AP’) market is fragmented. There are currently c.340 APs registered with the Office for Students, of which c.40 had a student intake of >250 in the 2021/22 academic year.
Our analysis of data from HESA indicates that in 2021/22, there were 68,000 undergraduate course starts at Alternative Providers. These figures represent the majority of starts at APs, albeit we note a slight undercount as 30 APs (out of c.350) do not report student demographics to HESA. The number of undergraduate course starts at APs has experienced significant growth since the 2017/18 academic year (35,000 starts).
