Defining our approach to student interest

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for the chance to speak today, and to hear from you about the work you are all doing for students, in this time of both substantial pressures on the higher education sector, but also new opportunities.

Setting the scene

One of the things that struck me, returning to the higher education sector as a regulator, having left it as a student union officer twenty years ago, was the sea-change in the role, practice and voice of the student movement – in individual institutions and across the sector.

I was a sabb at a time when the sector was coming to terms with what it meant to have a new fees system in which domestic undergraduates, who a few short years earlier had paid nothing up-front for tuition and were eligible for grants, were now borrowing their living costs and looking at a bill for being at university at all.

Whatever one thinks about those policy choices in the broadest scope, I think it is unarguable that the new relationship focused the minds of higher education leaders on the needs of students in a way that had not been seen before. I vividly recall seeking help for my dyslexia at one institution, where the student support officer (of whom there was only one) had a desk buried deep inside a brutalist concrete fortress, behind multiple doors that could only be opened by authorised staff; returning there recently, I noted that the equivalent office is now pretty much the first thing one sees entering that building, and is rather more generously staffed.

The change also gave opportunities for enhancing the role of students in determining the strategy and day-to-day governance of their institutions; opportunities the student movement took, in ways imaginative and impactful, which the scale and depth of the work represented here today demonstrates.

The Office for Students is also a product of the long arc of that refocusing on students – transmogrifying a funding council run, largely by and for the leaders of the university sector, into a regulator orientated towards students of all higher education provision, was a symbol of students’ central role in higher education.

Refreshing our approach to student interest

Six years on since the creation of the Office for Students, it’s fair to say we still have challenges delivering that centrality of student interest.

Part of this is that ‘the student interest’ is a knotty concept. It’s not a term students generally use about the bundle of needs, wants, and experiences they expect their higher education institution and the wider sector to serve, but it is noticeable to them when their interests are not being adequately considered.

And we recognise that our understanding and communication of the student interest has not always been strong enough or consistent enough for our regulation to be visible to students. As a result, students haven’t always felt the confidence in our regulation that they should.

In response, we have thought a great deal about the idea of the student interest – at board level, among the executive, and in discussions with all OfS colleagues, and in a number of engagements with students and representatives from the sector. It has also been reflected in our recent Public Bodies Review, led by our now interim chair, Sir David Behan, that we must ensure that students are involved much more in our work.

As we have reflected on this and engaged with more students – in polling, in focus groups, at our student panel – and discussed our emerging findings, a paradox has emerged: the way students talk about their experience of higher education sounds a lot like consumers describing a relationship with a service provider, and at the same time, students are, almost unanimously, against describing themselves as ‘consumers of higher education’.

So, what do you do when the customer is always right, but also says they aren’t a customer, but then also describes lots of issues and challenges in a way that a disappointed customer might do?

It isn’t as though we, as the higher education regulator, are not acutely aware of the baggage that comes with terms like ‘consumer’ and the market-focused discourse it implies  – but, frankly, it does seem to describe well significant aspects of what we need to think about to define and defend the student interest.

So, I am talking about this today, in part, to show the OfS’s working on this – what we have heard, what we’ve thought about saying, and what we actually plan to say.

What we’ve heard is that students do talk about abstract concepts that aren’t necessarily consumer-focused – ‘fairness’, ‘honesty’ and ‘belonging’ were the ones which came up most often – but they use them in ways consumers do, about concrete experiences they are having right now, and too often they feel short-changed.

To be absolutely clear, in all our engagement it was obvious that both students and the best-intentioned providers in the sector want respectful engagement between institutions of higher education and those who attend them.

But, while it was great to know that there are very many places in the sector where students and those who teach them, want to have a productive relationship built on trust and openness, as the regulator, we also know—as you, as student representatives and supporters will know—this is not always the case.

When students are unhappy, it is not just because reality has not matched their expectations—they are a pretty realistic bunch, generally—but because it doesn’t match what they were promised when they signed up.

They tell us they are not getting the teaching hours they were promised; they tell us their work is not marked and support offered in a timely fashion; they tell us they don’t have the time, resources, and opportunities to get involved with the extracurricular activities so prominently featured in the prospectus. And, crucially, students tell us frequently that if they are unhappy about any of these things, too often their university or college does not respond speedily and effectively.

These are parts of the student experience that involve the delivery of a service that students can very easily judge for themselves.

But, of course, there are issues that go beyond the ‘now’: a potentially related but distinct set of experiences, where judgements about the value of higher education provision cannot be made in the moment, or by the student alone, or without significant professional input. Whereas anyone can assess whether a sofa they want to buy is good quality by testing it before they use it, ‘try before you buy’ does not really work in education. It does not work especially well in the catering trade either, but at least you can be pretty confident when you’ve finished a meal whether it sated your appetite in a sufficiently delicious way.

But neither of those analogies work in higher education. Students might enjoy a lecture delivered in an especially entertaining style, but subsequently discover that they can remember none of it, or what they have taken away is out-dated or misleading. Students might be delighted to receive a first-class degree at graduation and only discover later that their institution has a reputation among employers for giving out too many high grades, too easily, and their progress is affected, long after they’ve left higher education, by something they cannot change.

But as I say, whilst we recognise that ‘students as consumers’ captures some elements of this work, we recognise that that language won’t work for all stakeholders.

So, the language we are currently planning to use draws a distinction between what is important to students when they are choosing and experiencing their education – their expectations and experiences 'now' – and what may only be revealed as significant many years later, or whose impact may never be fully appreciated – the 'future value' that comes from higher education.

I am keen to hear feedback on these distinctions, and the working that has gone on behind them – I am sharing them here and now precisely because we are still shaping this work, and keen to understand how useful it is to those we work with.

Refreshing our approach to student involvement in our work

We also want to make practical changes to our engagement with students. As we have recognised, the OfS’s articulation of ‘the student interest’ has not always been clear enough, and we have not been as transparent as students need us to be to feel full confidence in our regulation.

This is why we have reframed our thinking on student engagement to a three-fold distinction between:

1. student insight – what the OfS needs to know about what students experience before, during and after higher education in order to properly deliver our regulatory work;
2. student input – opportunities for students and their representatives to share what students think OfS needs to know, and hear our responses
3. and student information – what the OfS thinks students need to know, and what should be freely available to students, before, during and after their involvement in higher education.

In each of these areas, we are seeking to transform our approach.

But we have also learned to be cautious about over-promising and under-delivering in this area.

So, we are also taking our time to do this work, developing in stages, and paying close attention to students’ voices.

• To increase our access to insight, we have already expanded our use of polling and focus groups to develop a more sophisticated understanding of students’ experiences of higher education, and we will do more, more often in this space. We also hope to establish student insight internships, to offer current students interested in a career in social research the opportunity to hone their skills as part of the team building the regulator’s knowledge of their fellow students’ perspectives.
• To ensure ongoing opportunities for input, we have extended the appointments of our current student panel members and have had productive conversations about the future role of the panel. We are thinking about the value of changes along the same lines as our recently convened Disability in Higher Education Advisory Panel. There we have brought together a wider membership, including students alongside staff responsible for relevant issues in providers and other external expertise.
• Following recommendations made in the Public Bodies Review, we are looking to strengthen the role of our student panel, by tying it more closely to our board, as well as launching quarterly ‘student briefings’ for students and student bodies in the autumn as an opportunity to hear from them directly about areas they care about.
• As part of our focus on information, we will review the use students make of the Discover Uni website and the National Student Survey, to ensure we have the right tools to put relevant info in front of students. I should be clear that these programmes are co-funded by the OfS and our sister regulatory and funding agencies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and while all four nations acknowledge that at times we use our shared tools differently, we will of course engage with them as we shape our plans.

To reiterate, in many parts of many providers, students and their institutions have strong, positive relationships. Some aspects of English higher education work incredibly well. It is not our intention to interfere where there is no cause for concern – the benefit of this stronger and more consistent approach to involving students is that the OfS will be clearer where the system is not currently delivering for students.

And, critically, we will be better able to identify the areas in which the OfS can and should be using its regulation to drive improvement.

If we are to ensure the fairness, honesty and belonging that we hear so often and so strongly from students and staff, the irreducible core focus of our interest as a regulator must always be the quality of learning and teaching—for without the relationship between students and teachers, there would be no higher education sector to belong to—and we will work with students much more closely as we continue to assess quality across the sector, because we know that is a key aspect of the student experience.

But we will also be vigilant for other aspects of higher education where the OfS can make a credible difference to students’ lives, even if we do not hold all the cards.

For example, if we were to conclude that students have been led to expect adequate accommodation within a reasonable distance of campus—which is a key component of belonging for many undergraduates—it would only be fair for us to expect providers to take action to achieve that. Given we have no regulatory powers over private student housing providers, we have to be open and honest with students that the OfS cannot wave a magic wand and make reasonably priced student flats appear overnight.

But the OfS must take a role, or at least have a view, where students are being treated unfairly, even if it is only to give an honest and open account to the sector and to government about the state of student experiences and the likely impact of those on student outcomes.

By putting the protection of the student interest at the heart of our next strategy – conceptually and in very practical terms – we can ensure that we are regulating the things that matter to students, that we are protecting them, and that all our activity is properly informed by students’ views.

Summing up

You in this hall all know, better than anyone, the challenges students face in getting in, and getting on in, higher education. And you all know that just asserting that the student is the heart of the system does not make it so – there are long-established policies and expectations, built up over decades, about what the relationship between students and the institutions they attend ought to be.

The enormous expansion of higher education over the past eighty years, and especially the recent growth in student numbers and shifts in funding, demand that we re-examine those enduring attitudes and assumptions.

To that end, in the next few weeks, the OfS will release for consultation our new strategy, which will mark a turning point in our work with students. Throughout the next year, you will see the OfS using more and better tools to listen to students—current, future, and recent graduates—and being more open about how their voices are shaping what we do.

The OfS was founded to make the student interest fundamental to the operation of English higher education. We will work tirelessly with you, and with students, to ensure we keep that founding promise.

Thank you.