Consultation on OfS strategy for 2025 to 2030

Foreword

The world around us is changing. Geopolitical shifts, disruptive technology, and demographic and migratory trends are just some of the forces contributing to a global environment that is increasingly volatile, uncertain and complex. Against this backdrop, higher education institutions must navigate a funding landscape shaped by a decline in the real terms value of domestic student fees, record inflation and increasing global competition for international students. Students continue to contend with the rising cost of living and the aftereffects of coronavirus, all while looking to uncertain economic futures.

Within this context, a high-performing higher education sector has never been more important. Universities and colleges are engines of growth and drivers of opportunity, powering our economy and enriching local communities. Our proposed strategy sets out the role that the OfS will play in helping the sector to deliver the diverse and far-reaching benefits of high quality higher education.

Our proposals are driven by the student interest and underpinned by research and engagement designed to help us understand students’ priorities and concerns. We polled students and convened student focus groups, consulted our student panel and hosted strategy engagement sessions for students and staff from higher education institutions. Events explored what students want from higher education, and the extent to which they get it. We are grateful to those who shared their views.

Student engagement has been at the heart of our strategy development. It is also core to the strategy itself. The student interest is not fixed, and as students’ priorities change it is important we continue to listen and learn, as we embed their perspectives in our work.

To deliver our proposals we must change as a regulator. Having established the OfS, conducted the largest risk assessment in the sector’s history through the registration process, and emerged from the other side of a global pandemic, we entered a period of reflection. We considered what was working and what needed to change, informed both by the Public Bodies Review of the OfS and the House of Lords Industry and Regulators Committee report. This reflection – which was not always comfortable – has shaped the strategy on which we are now seeking views.

Our proposed strategy takes forward the four strategic priorities identified by the Public Bodies Review. These align with the findings of our research and engagement. They are quality, the wider student interest, financial sustainability and protecting public money. Our continued commitment to equality of opportunity is integrated throughout these priority areas, ensuring that it remains central to everything that we do.

Organising our work around these clearly defined priorities will support more effective delivery while also helping institutions to understand and anticipate our regulatory approach. Our proposed strategy sets out in more detail the thinking that sits behind these priorities.

We will improve delivery of our core functions as we learn and mature as a regulator. But we are also signalling a more significant programme of transformation. Collectively, our proposals are intended to enable confident, agile regulation in the interests of students, against a backdrop of change. We will transform our approach to regulating quality, developing an integrated approach that drives continuous improvement across the sector, and strengthen our role as a champion of the student interest. We will continue to reshape our relationship with institutions and work collaboratively with government partners, including to ensure that we are ready as the government’s higher education reform agenda takes shape in the coming months. And we will continue working to improve, evaluating our approach and learning from others as we go.

A continued commitment to building a relationship with higher education institutions that is based on respect, confidence, trust and reciprocity underpins this programme of work. We will develop and deliver change in collaboration with the institutions we regulate. That change will need to be realised with ambition and at pace, with the first steps towards our strategic goals starting in early 2025. We will begin to discuss with students and institutions how our new integrated quality model should take shape. We will explain how we plan to secure the more real-time data a modern agile regulator needs to be effective. And we will publish proposals for reforming the approach we take to registering new institutions, smoothing the pathway into the regulated system for those that will offer high quality and innovative education to students.

The strategy that follows sets out our plan for ensuring that students from all backgrounds benefit from high quality higher education, delivered by a diverse, sustainable sector that continues to improve. We invite all those with an interest in higher education to tell us if they think we have got it right.

Susan Lapworth, Chief Executive of the Office for Students