One of the more surprising announcements in recent months from the former Minister for Higher Education and, briefly, Secretary of State for Education, was the announcement of a wave of inspections of universities to be conducted by the Office for Students.
The initial driver for this appeared to be a concern that, post-pandemic, many universities were not returning to full in-person teaching for students and that this represented poor value for money. But there is clearly more to it than this as reported in the Daily Mail. You would be forgiven for thinking from the description of ‘hit squads’ who will be swooping into universities and ‘coming down hard’ on any online activity that this is the equivalent of a major drugs bust or tackling some other highly illegal operation rather than a few very particular concerns that academic staff were not willing to offer face to face teaching.
