There are currently 53 institutions of higher education whose TEF results are marked as “pending” on the official OfS website. These cater for over 420,000 students, or 15% of the total UK student population.
It’s a reasonable assumption that many of these have been (provisionally) given “Requires Improvement” status. This rating is likely to be the death-knell for any higher education institution, which is why they will be right to contest it with all their might: The OfS encourages students to use TEF ratings “which provide a clear signal of a provider’s excellence”, and has suggested that UCAS will publish the ratings alongside, for instance, course availability. Students will surely shun offerings which the official regulator has branded “Requires Improvement”.
Meanwhile, while these appeals are heard, there’s an awful lot of students who are left in a position of some uncertainty regarding the quality of their provider.
Except they shouldn’t be. It’s the category itself that needs renewed and continued challenging. “Requires Improvement” makes no sense at all, even in the OfS’s own terms. “Requires Improvement” in fact means that the institution has reached a uniformly “High Quality”, that it has met all the regulatory requirements for high quality.
