What’s next in equality of opportunity regulation

Good morning, and thank you very much for inviting me here to speak today. I am hoping to cover two fairly meaty topics today – firstly, some reflections on where we are with the current round of Access and Participation Plans (APPs), and secondly, provide some insight into our thinking about the next stage of equality regulation in English higher education.

Access and participation plans

Before anything else, I wanted to start by thanking everyone here, and your colleagues in your institutions and in providers across the country, for the incredible efforts which have gone into the renewed Access and Participation Plans.

I appreciate that, since I joined the OfS, colleagues with responsibility for equality issues in English universities and colleges have had a great deal of work to do. Over 230 providers responded to my call for variations to their existing APPs, to provide us with greater detail on your work with earlier phases of education and on flexible and diverse routes into and through higher education.

Over 200 providers have now submitted brand new plans, focussed on addressing the biggest risks to equality of opportunity for their students and potential students. Our pioneer cohort are now implementing those plans, and we have assessed and approved the majority of Wave 2, with just a few left for my final review, before we complete the whole process with Wave 3.

I am very pleased to report that the changes we made to our approach to seeking students’ views on the plans has resulted in 104 formal submissions, contributing to OfS’s renewed commitment to meaningful student involvement in our regulatory work.

Focus on evaluation

Of particular importance to me is our focus on enhancing the amount and quality of evaluation of the interventions committed to in the APPs. Ours is a sector founded on knowledge creation, curation, and communication, and all the skills of enquiry, synthesis and evidence-informed practice that drive the disciplines English HE providers research and teach, should also be turned to the vital priorities of expanding the numbers of students able to enter HE, and ensuring they have the best chance to succeed once they are admitted.

For that reason, I have been genuinely delighted with the work on evaluation promised in the new APPs – greater investment and firm commitments to publish the results.

It has also been great to see the constructive challenge those who work on equality in HE have made to the OfS about this evaluation work.

A couple of weeks ago, I was at a conference where Liz Austen, Professor of Higher Education Evaluation at Sheffield Hallam, provided all those attending with some valuable food-for-thought about what it means to call something an 'intervention', what that means for how we involve students in evaluation, and avoiding 'evaluation fatigue' when students’ views are the primary evidence for assessing impact.

Others there pressed me on our approach to targets, accountability, and how OfS will take into account the wider context of English HE during the lifetime of the plans.

All these are valid and useful critiques, and this feedback makes a real difference to how we at OfS approach our work.

Financial sustainability

I am particularly alert to questions about how the commitments entered into in the renewed APPs will be sustained in the current moment of adversity English higher education finds itself in.

The OfS will shortly publish an update to the report on financial sustainability that we published back in May. There are other OfS colleagues far more adept at understanding the nuances of that, so I won’t attempt to pre-empt their conclusions here, but a short summary of our May report would be that cash flow is down, surpluses are down, liquidity is down, international student numbers are down, the only thing that’s up is the number and size of deficits, and both are expected to rise. That is not a situation likely to improve in the immediate term, notwithstanding Monday’s announcement on tuition fees.

At the same time, we also recently received the disturbing news that, for the first time in over a decade, the rate of entry for students in receipt of free school meals is down on previous years, and that the differences in progression between FSM students and others is at the highest level recorded.

Sadly, we should acknowledge this is not a surprise: as Tim Oates of Cambridge University Press and Assessment makes clear in a recent publication for the Association of School and College Leaders, whilst the Covid pandemic may be a thing of the past, its impact in schools is not.

And that which impacts schools inevitably flows through into higher education.

Since starting this job, I have talked frequently about the mountains of evidence that disadvantages experienced in early childhood and primary and secondary school stack up for some children – and that, while that is not the fault of higher education, it is our problem. The diversity of intake we seek cannot be achieved, nor the necessary support for their success offered, without taking account of, and intervening to improve, the educational journeys undertaken before students even consider applying for HE.

The impact of Covid has made every single one of those problems more acute, but has also introduced a whole host of further challenges: depending on which aspect of their socialisation and education children had foreshortened by lockdown, their needs are different, in ways less predictable and more diffuse than anything we have seen before.

The inheritance of Covid and the financial position of our sector set the context in which the new APPs will be implemented.

Regulatory requirements when delivering access and participation plans

There is no point pretending that diminishing financial resources and expanding equality needs can sometimes be in tension, and balancing those imperatives will require agility and good sense from those we regulate, and it will require it from us as the regulator.

But it is our role to act in the students’ interest, and I have to remind colleagues that providers’ APP commitments, including to published evaluation, are regulatory requirements and the OfS expects them to be sustained and delivered.

Unilaterally walking away from partnerships or pre-emptively abandoning agreed activities (including for students in franchised provision) or adjusting APPs without securing prior agreement from the OfS, and then pleading financial hardship at the end of the APP period, is not appropriate, and will trigger regulatory interest.

The quid-pro-quo of this is that we are always here for a conversation with providers who feel they are at risk of not delivering on their APP, and for those who find themselves needing to consider entering a variation discussion with us, I would reiterate three core principles:

• Early intervention – ensuring the knowledge, skills and experience of HE practitioners is in the mix with our expert colleagues in the school system;
• Partnership – particularly in this pre-HE space, collaboration is essential not only for efficiency but also to serve the best interests of students
• And, of course, evaluation. Given how challenging our situation is and those differential impacts of Covid, we must understand whether metrics moving is a response to our activity; without a clear explanation as to why things are getting better, we cannot scale or replicate that impact; if a well-theorised intervention does not deliver, good evaluation can support others to re-direct their efforts.

My hope is that together, we can ensure students’ interests are served whilst sustaining the open, productive and above all, collaborative dialogue between providers and the regulator which has characterised the recent APP process.

Supporting continuous improvement

In particular, I want to ensure the OfS continues to support and sustain the atmosphere of continuous improvement, underwritten by the spirit of collective empirical enquiry which the evaluation and publication commitments in the new APPs create.

For that reason, I am pleased to announce that the OfS will fund an evidence repository for the evaluation work providers produce as part of their APPs, which will be established by TASO as part of its annual funding of £1.5 million pounds.

The repository will support evaluation and TASO’s wider work, which itself will continue to be a crucial part of the expanding evidence eco-system for equality work.

We will set out more details on the inclusion criteria in due course, but broadly we will be looking for interim and final reports to be submitted (whether these demonstrate an impact or not).

These reports will allow TASO to summarise findings and provide thematic overviews of evidence that will support the sector to improve the impact of our work by drawing on the best evidence, and allow the OfS to provide guidance on appropriate interventions where the evidence supports this.

It will also support TASO to develop its evaluation guides and toolkits.

Having renewed APPs and expanded our evidence-collection and dissemination capability, we have also been giving considerable thought to what ongoing support the OfS can offer for collaboration between providers, especially in the pre-HE space.

Uni Connect

Colleagues are likely aware that the OfS commissioned a significant review of the work undertaken by the network of Uni Connect partnerships we have funded since our inception.

This was to help us form a view about what is happening now in that space, but also what needs to happen, to ensure that the right support is available for students to make the best choice about higher education for them.

The evidence of that review is clear: Uni Connect is good value for money; for every £1 spent on Uni Connect, the program has generated between £5 and £9 economic benefit, shared between the students involved and their communities. I’ll say again: a return of between 500 and 900%.

Further, it is very clear that, when central funding for this work disappears—as it did early in the last decade—although staff committed to this work will try to find ways to keep aspects of it going, the energy and effort is dissipated and what remains is inevitably inconsistent across the country, with obvious deleterious impacts on students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

That said, we know that the OfS’s work with the sector on these issues can be improved.

Next steps in access and participation

It is still the case that those entering the sector immediately after compulsory education are forced, by the systems we have all collectively built, to make potentially life-defining decisions to a timetable designed around provider interests not student needs, and based on insufficient information.

And I do mean information; there is no shortage of data, whether numerical or prose, thrown at students, but I question how much of it is actually meaningful to them.

I recognise that part of this is because the incentives to act in the students’ interests are not properly aligned – in the sector I used to work in, schools were previously encouraged to get their students into the most selective institution they can, irrespective of whether the course and its context is the right one to meet their aspirations.

And HE providers too have been incentivised to tackle this problem purely at the level of a single institution, encouraging a link between provider marketing and pre-HE equality work that cuts across everything we know about the importance of impartial advice about all the available options.

If we are to win an argument for ongoing funding of this crucial work, there will need to be changes in how these networks are organised and run, and in how OfS oversees and leads this work.

To support that, today I want to announce our thinking around the next steps in access and participation work. We want to design a system that ensures students from disadvantaged and historically excluded backgrounds are able to access the advice, support and engagement they need to make a meaningful choice about higher education, and for them to be confident they have weighed up all the options open to them.

The objectives of this renewed project will be:

• Early, persistent, and consistent engagement – ensuring universities and colleges can play their part in giving all aspiring students the opportunity to gain the knowledge, skills and experiences they need to be confident in the choices they make on their pathway to achieving their aspirations, at multiple points along their journey. This strand will subsume what I have, till now, called 'attainment raising' – instead of being a stand-alone, compulsory focus, building knowledge and skills directly will be part of the repertoire of activities, deployed where necessary.
• Provision of full, frank, and fair information on all higher education – ensuring that no decision a student faces is taken without an awareness of all the options potentially open to them. This information needs to support students to make good choices for them - whether that is finding the right course, right location or even going directly into work if that is the right path for them. Our use of targets and metrics needs to facilitate this focus on students’ interests.
• Supported transitions – ensuring that there is collaboration between pre-HE and on course equality work, to make sure that students get ongoing support to settle into their new course.
• A deepening of our commitment to collaboration with regional partnerships delivering against a shared national purpose and focusing on tackling local and regional challenges.

With APPs as integrated tool, the partnerships will help to collectively address the risks to equality of opportunity across the country laid out in the Equality of Opportunity Risk Register. To achieve this, we will seek the funds to establish, and sustain over time, a network of partnerships building on the impact of Uni Connect but under a new, common brand, which will emphasise all the options available in higher education. With APPs as integrated tool, the partnerships will help to collectively address the risks to equality of opportunity across the country laid out in the Equality of Opportunity Risk Register.

We envisage partnerships dividing their efforts between supporting a new, national offer aimed at ensuring no student groups are left behind, direct provision of services to students are most risk of inequality in their region, and supporting and coordinating the work of providers within their region.

Positive impact of collaboration

The work the OfS commissioned on the future of Uni Connect was absolutely clear that the system needs a strong guiding hand to yoke institutions’ plans together, and encourage collaboration to achieve greater, collective impact.

To support their role in regional co-ordination, we will be moving to a system of cohort renewal for APPs, but that will not be before the end of the current APP plans.

Once we have agreed the regional partnership structures, providers will be invited to extend their current APP plans for one, two or three years, as necessary to ensure that all providers in a region are in the same cohort, and that approximately one quarter of all APPs are renewed each year.

We will put into the hands of the new partnerships the tools needed to properly co-ordinate collective action by providers across their region, including an expectation that providers will secure the agreement of their local partnership before an access and participation plan can be submitted for consideration by the OfS.

And where students are impaired by lack of sufficiently flexible and diverse pathways, or by limited course options, the OfS could have a role using our funding power to incentivise providers to widen the options available.

Working together for a stronger sector

None of this will be simple.

In particular, we are still in close discussion with the DfE about the future funding for partnership work – we know it can work to make real differences for aspiring students, we know it will not happen if it is not funded centrally, and we know it cannot succeed if providers do not engage.

We will need to work through those complexities in the coming weeks and months, with colleagues in government, in sector groups, and in other phases of education – all the while dealing with the consequences of the financial adversity I described earlier.

But it is right that we seize this moment of disruption and difficulty to ensure that the higher education sector which emerges from it is stronger and more focussed than before, and OfS must play our part in delivering that, in partnership with universities and colleges, yes, but always privileging the interests of students above all.

Thank you.