One of the big items on what is an ever-growing worry list for higher education in England is the implementation of the B4 condition of registration by the Office for Students.
There is significant concern in the sector about how this condition of registration, which is intended to ensure that students are assessed effectively and that assessment is valid and reliable and awards are credible, is going to work in practice.
The B4 condition includes the following guidance:
335U. As part of its approach to assessing compliance with this condition, the OfS is likely to need access to students’ assessed work, including for students who are no longer registered on a course. A provider is therefore expected to retain appropriate records of students’ assessed work for such regulatory purposes for a period of five years after the end date of a course. Where possible, a provider is expected to retain records of student assessments in an anonymised form by removing students’ personal data from the records.
This is further amplified by a subsequent piece of guidance in the same document about the consequences of absence of such records:
335W. The absence of records of students’ assessed work may lead the OfS to make negative inferences about a provider’s compliance and/or may result in the OfS taking targeted regulatory action to address the risk that it is unable to monitor compliance and regulate effectively.
