Operational measures

Notifications are an important component of our risk-based approach to regulation. They are new information from third parties about a provider that is directly relevant to our regulatory activity. We use this to update our assessment of the risk that a provider may breach its conditions of registration and consider whether any intervention is necessary. 

It is important that we consider the information in incoming notifications quickly so that we have up-to-date risk assessments. If our approach for notifications is efficient, then we would expect short resolution times and few unresolved cases. 

We published new guidance for students, student representatives and students’ unions about notifications in January 2021.

OM 2 includes data on notification cases received between 1 January 2021 and 31 December 2023.

OM 2A shows that, between 1 January 2021 and 31 December 2023, we have received 792 notification cases and resolved 743 cases.

We received 208 of these notification cases between 1 July 2023 and 31 December 2023. We resolved 197 cases in this period. At the end of December 2023, we held 49 unresolved notifications cases.

OM 2B shows that, at 31 December 2023, the maximum length of time we would expect to take to resolve a new notification was 45 days.

The chart that accompanies OM 2B shows the number of days taken to resolve each notification and how this varies over time. We plot an upper control limit to help us understand this variation. The upper control limit for this chart was 45 days as at 31 December. This means that the maximum time within which we currently expect to resolve a notification is 45 days.

We use this chart to understand our current performance and to prompt questions about what may be causing the variation we can see in the data. This helps us identify ways we can improve our regulatory activity.

These measures are based on data from our internal systems about the individual notifications we receive and resolve. 

A notification is considered resolved when: 

• the information contained in it is considered; and either  
• no further action is required at that time; or  
• the case is progressed to further regulatory action, such as investigation. 

The upper control limit is calculated for a set of consecutive notification resolution times. It is three standard deviations from the mean for this set of data. 

We published new guidance for students, student representatives and students’ unions about notifications in January 2021. The data shown here is based only on notifications that were first recorded after the new guidance was published. Any notifications recorded before the new guidance was published are not included.  

The OM 2 data shown here is slightly different to that previously published. This is as a result of retrospective corrections to the data. The data used for our key performance measures is unaffected. 

Download OM 2 data as an Excel file.