The Higher Education and Research Act of 2017 (HERA) asserts that both the Secretary of State and the Office for Students ‘must have regard to the need to protect the institutional autonomy of English higher education providers’. HERA s. 8 defines this autonomy in terms which have been accepted since they were defined in the Robbins Report.[1] These allow providers to decide their own syllabuses, choose which students to admit and determine who to employ as ‘academic staff’.
There is now an enormous range of ‘higher education providers’. Is it appropriate that they should all enjoy such institutional autonomy? Questions are being asked. The National Audit Office (NAO) has published an Investigation into student finance for study at franchised higher education providers (DFE HC 387). It records that ‘almost two-thirds of franchised providers are not registered’ with the Office for Students. The Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) is also conducting an inquiry.
Both the NAO and the PAC have conducted previous inquiries into the category of ‘alternative’ private providers of higher education for much the same reason, that they were admitting inappropriately-qualified students in order to gain income from the Student Loans Company loans they brought with them, and providing neither acceptable courses nor appropriately qualified lecturers. In the Commons on 5 December 2013, the Rt Hon David Willetts noted that ‘the number of students going to alternative providers has increased dramatically, and in order to maintain budgetary controls, we have introduced further limits on the numbers’, though he argued that these were ‘worthwhile courses’. Between 2010 and 2014-15 the number of alternative providers rose from 94 to 122. The resulting increase in the national cost of student loans prompted a National Audit Office investigation as early as 2011, [2] with others to follow in 2014-15. A Public Accounts Committee report on ‘alternative providers’ published in February 2015 acknowledged that the Department had ‘pressed ahead with the expansion of the alternative provider sector without a robust legislative framework to protect public money’.
