If you think back to early September, the notable thing about the House of Lords Industry and Regulators Committee report on the work of the Office for Students was how carefully written it was.
Neither the report, nor the inquiry that preceded it, revealed anything that we didn’t expect about England’s higher education regulator.
Previously…
But both helpfully shifted the knee-jerk response to questions about the absolute state of OfS on from “universities don’t like being regulated” – both highlighted concerns with the drafting and implementation of the Higher Education and Research Act.
The four stand-out moments, as far as these things go, were:
- the revelations about the place of students in the Office for Students (worse, somehow than we expected)
- the criticism of the perceived closeness of the independent regulator to the government of the day (government peer, serial funder of Conservative MPs, and erstwhile OfS chair Lord Wharton of Yarm in particular)
- the school playground level approach to the Designated Quality Body question
- and the less splashy but deeply concerning suggestion that OfS didn’t really understand the financial problems the sector was facing.
