At the end of July the Office for Students (OfS) published the student outcomes data dashboard, showing measures of continuation, completion and progression outcomes for providers, including student data for 2022-23.
The inclusion of a new partnership view is a positive step in increasing transparency and recognising the important role that this type of provision plays, which we explore in more depth in our recent report on Academic Partnerships in the UK.
The majority of higher education providers in the UK do not have their own awarding powers, relying instead on partnership arrangements to award qualifications. Often, the teaching partner will sit outside the regulatory model, so are not required to submit data to the OfS, although some will provide data to their awarding provider for submission.
Publishing the data available via the awarding body for this part of the sector is therefore an important part of meeting the intention behind the B3 metrics to ensure quality and positive outcomes for students in partnership provision.
A start
However, there are limits to how useful this data really is. The initial release shows only aggregate outcomes per awarding partner for all students taught in a partnership arrangement. In most cases, this means teaching partners are grouped together and their data is indistinguishable. This is unhelpful for both sides of the partnership.
The purpose of the B3 condition, according to the OfS, is to protect students and encourage choice. In forming the condition, the OfS had due regard to the code of practice for statistics, so we should expect that this data should be “useful, easy to access, remain relevant, and support understanding of important issues”.
The dashboards, in their current form, don’t do these things: they don’t provide the transparency that students need to make informed choices. After all, for them it is the teaching quality and experience where they are taught that matters –at the moment, this remains unclear.
It’s also unhelpful for the teaching partners themselves, with those that perform well lumped in with those that don’t – missing the opportunity to evidence some of the high-quality provision offered via partnerships. The OfS plans to share disaggregated data with only awarding providers in the first instance – enabling them to identify areas that need attention. This is all very well, but what about the teaching partners whose students the data actually relates to?
Who returns data?
As part of our Academic Partnerships project surveys, we found that of the 38 per cent of awarding partners responsible for returning student data to the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) most (78 per cent) were “unsure” whether a data sharing arrangement existed, which would allow the teaching partner to access data on student outcomes. If teaching providers can’t see their own data, they will struggle to address the areas they need to improve. This leaves them disadvantaged in their partnership and in the sector.
The seemingly good news is that OfS intends to begin publishing disaggregated data next year. OfS may want to review this data with partnership providers themselves ahead of the release to identify issues now. Many of the teaching partners in partnership arrangements have flexible course models and specialised teaching that attract students who may not otherwise go into higher education. These courses have been designed to meet the needs of students or industry – not the regulatory model – and so they don’t always fit the metrics. The OfS’s recently published quality reports on B3 show just how important this context is, with three of the twelve case reports not being investigated because of contextual justifications.
OfS has yet to publish any substantial work on partnerships. Despite a directive from HERA to explore validation with the aim of providing stability to this model, there remains little clarity from OfS on their approach to regulating validated provision or supporting successful partnerships. OfS has not published any insight on franchise provision. Our work from earlier this year shows that OfS’s own definitions of subcontract and validation partnerships are too broad and cover very different models, which may not be effectively regulated by the same approach. If data is published on the basis of columns P and Q in the OfS register spreadsheet, joint-degree models will be lumped in with franchise provision and with complicated partnerships for educating teachers.
Types of partnership
It would also be helpful if OfS looked more closely at the types of provision offered within partnerships in a way only they can, through their access to more detailed data. How many partnerships are online? How many fill the gap left in the part-time education offer? How many are offered mostly or exclusively to industry or employees of a specific organisation or professional accreditation? How different will this data look to the standard data currently published?
We must also be mindful of the volume of data about to be presented to us; there are hundreds of franchised providers operating outside of the regulatory environment. The OfS took 18 months to publish eleven out of twelve investigations opened in February 2023. Once all the nuance of the disaggregated data hits us, how we will reach a detailed understanding of what is happening?
The inclusion of partnership provision in published student outcomes data has the potential to be a positive step for students and the sector, but without true transparency, context and the necessary nuance it might create more problems than it solves. IHE’s report on Academic Partnerships demonstrates the diversity of this part of the HE sector and is just one step towards understanding the value and risk of these types of delivery models. OfS must now step back and look more closely at this data, in collaboration with the sector, to help everyone understand what they are seeing ahead of publication next year.
