Kenneth Baker memorably described further education as the Cinderella sector. But all tertiary education providers without university in their title will be forgiven for sometimes feeling like they are locked in the cellar of public debate, mostly out of sight.
And just like further education colleges, the vast majority of independent providers can only offer higher education in partnership with a university – or in many cases, multiple universities all at once. These partnerships are the carriages without which these Cinderella providers would not get within a whisker of the higher education ball.
Partnerships are engines of social mobility and of student choice. They are precious and too often they are fragile. At the stroke of midnight, a Cinderella provider who believed they had a reliable partner can suddenly find themselves alone in the street holding a pumpkin.
The National Audit Office report last week which documents incidents of fraud and lax quality controls within franchised provision makes for uncomfortable reading. For those of us who have lived the ups and downs of regulating higher education over the past 15 years (did I mention IHE just celebrated its birthday?), it is also immensely frustrating. It speaks to a continued failure of the regulation introduced by the Higher Education and Research Act in 2017 to prioritise its most fundamental aim: a single system for everyone, with a regulator that takes responsibility for every student, and that understands and facilitates all of the very different institutional contexts in which they learn.
