Following the Office for Students these days can feel a bit like the Taylor Swift fandom. You really do have to follow every twist and turn in various relationships or you miss an awful lot of context.
So when Thursday afternoon sees the publication of a speech made by John Blake at the Universities UK Access Participation and Student Success conference, you would expect plenty in there for the sector kremlinologist. What you might not expect is a major policy announcement snuck into a few paragraphs towards the end.
As a refresher – OfS has reviewed and approved the majority of the first two waves of institutional access plans based on the equality of opportunity risk register, with the third wave coming in next year. If you are busy working on or delivering one of these plans you can rest assured that nothing has changed for this cycle.
Repetition legitimises
But it has been an open question what happens after that. You might have expected, after numerous changes to the process – often mid-stream – over the years, that it may be time for a simple repetition of the current plans. Providers are firefighting on numerous fronts, the current approach appears to be working and has probably landed more positively in the sector than anything else the sector has experienced from OfS.
It would also be fair to assume that things may flex a little. The EORR would of course be updated, and wider pressures bearing down on the sector (financially: of course the ability to charge higher level fees is linked to access and participation plans), applications (the dip in applications from people with a history of free schools meals, noted in parliament by Bridget Phillipson, is a real concern), and wider society (Covid and the legacy of Covid is still a big issue in schools) need to be addressed.
You could also imagine a world where the local and regional missions that universities have, very much in line with wider government strategy on localism and growth, become an ever-growing focus within regulatory activity.
And all of these things, as it turns out, are correct.
Blake’s progress
To quote the man himself:
There is no point pretending that diminishing financial resources and expanding equality needs can (sic: I think he means “cannot” – double negatives are hard!) 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
Agility and good sense, eh? He’s concerned particularly about where universities may not be able to carry out planned activities because of financial pressure – asking providers to engage early with the regulator to avoid a more assertive approach. And nobody should be skimping on evaluation – there’s a £1.5 million investment in a TASO-led evidence repository so the sector can learn what works and avoid duplicating failing experiments. TASO will chip in with guides and thematic overviews.
Specifically on the financial pressure point – we learn that an update to this year’s financial sustainability report (out back in May) is coming “shortly”.
Only connect?
But the big news is on Uni Connect. OfS feels like it publishes a report about how clear it is that this approach (early intervention based on university-school partnerships) works and works well – but it always feels like it sat off to one side of the wider access approach. No longer. OfS will “seek the funds” to establish a “network of partnerships” based on the Uni Connect approach to sustain this valuable work – a new branding is coming (so it won’t be called university connect) and it will align more closely with the APP expanded universe.
How so? Well:
The system needs a strong guiding hand to yoke institutions plans together, and encourage collaboration to achieve greater, collective, impact
The next round of APPs will be renewed by cohort, based on new regional partnership structures. As an institution, your application to extend your current plan by one, two, three years – whatever you need to fall into sync with your region – will need the agreement of your local partnership before it is submitted to OfS. And as you will have spotted, this gives OfS the opportunity to intervene – with funding – where problems are emerging regionally.
The crux of the biscuit
It’s great to have policy in development shared early, and I’m sure that Blake will welcome sector feedback on the ideas put forward (though the bureaucratic realist in me feels like maybe stuff like this should be launched a little bit more formally – not everyone has the time or inclination to look for conceptual continuity clues).
For me, OfS has long been weak on geography. Though the toybox of institutional interventions and incentives is full to overflowing (many unused and still in their original packaging), it has comparatively few tools to address issues around space and place. In abandoning HEFCE’s old regional structure it has always found it hard to take a local or regional review on the size and shape of higher education provision.
With a Labour government making a lot of noise about place and skills planning, to remain relevant OfS needs to have an angle on the ways in which providers sit with a local skills ecosystem that reaches up and out from the compulsory sector. This plan is classic John Blake in that it builds around the limitations of the way OfS was designed, and embeds yet another national mission within the access and participation planning regime.
