When the fourth single from the Office for Students’ new quality album dropped the other day, I happened to be in a room of SU officers and managers.
They’d never been fans of OfS’ previous work – they’d regarded it as fairly distant from the tastes of their own students, not commercial enough, too focussed on impressing (music) journos – but this time, it felt like #newmusictuesday had delivered the goods.
This was a room of people that had spent years making carefully constructed arguments about the efficacy of and model for personal tutoring, which had tended to feel more like an ambition than a policy. Seeing the regulator pick that up elsewhere was pleasing.
They’d spent some years – more intensely in the cost of living crisis – making careful arguments about timetabling, “opt in” lecture capture and the need to balance the need for immersive, in-person contact with the complexity of students’ lives. The news that OfS was concerned about that was helpful.
