Can you deliver quality through more regulation?

The Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper, which we have all been expecting on and off for some time now, finally arrived yesterday (after a short final delay thanks to urgent questions about spying and a Villa match). I think it is fair to say that, despite some leakage, there were things in there which took some in the sector by surprise. I had made some predictions a while back about what might be in there but was, sadly, way off beam with almost all of them (apart from one successful hit).

Perhaps the most surprising elements for me were, first, the scale of the plans for Higher Education (I was expecting a few scraps rather than a third of the 70-odd pages being HE-focused) and secondly, the central role given to the Office for Students in relation to all of the non-research areas.

The punishments will continue until morale improves

All the coverage is focused on tuition fee rises which are intended, according to the government, to stabilize universities’ financial positions. As the DfE explainer ‘Everything you need to know about the new higher education reforms’ (and, by implication, were afraid to ask) puts it:

To help stabilise university finances, tuition fee caps will rise with forecast inflation, ensuring that universities can continue to deliver high-quality courses. 

In future, only universities that achieve quality ratings, demonstrating strong outcomes and positive experiences for their students, will be allowed to charge the maximum fee. 

This means universities will need to show that they’re offering real value for students and the taxpayer.

The detail of the White Paper links the ability to charge higher fees to the new OfS regulatory framework which is currently out for consultation. This framework is intended to bring together the current OfS framework with a revised version of TEF make a new and shiny regulatory architecture which will both incentivise and recognise quality by linking results to fees. It’s possible this won’t work.

Leaving aside the fact that the original conception of TEF sought to do something rather similar before that was abandoned as an approach it seems to me that there is something fundamentally wrong about trying to develop a funding arrangement and a regulatory system which is intended to promote and reward high quality but actually serves as a punishment for those who get it wrong. It is also seeking to build a new regulatory regime on the very shaky foundations of the current one.

Pig fattening ambitions

From the DfE explainer:

Students deserve to know that their time and money are being well spent. 

The Office for Students (OfS) will have new powers to make sure universities maintain high standards and deliver good student outcomes and satisfaction rates. 

If courses don’t deliver for students, the OfS will be able to act quickly to hold providers to account. 

The government will also take action against abuse of the system by recruitment agents.  

Many of the proposals in the White Paper around regulation demonstrate what looks to me to be a significant and perhaps unexpected vote of confidence in the OfS. There are plenty of references to extending and enhancing the work of the OfS in the White Paper. These include:

• Five instances of “support” for the OfS
• Four areas where government will “work with” the regulator
• Two statements of intent to “empower” the OfS
• Five comments which refer to legislation or strengthening the OfS’s regulatory or statutory powers
• There are also comments relating to increasing the OfS’s capacity to undertake assessments and involving them in a “task and finish group” on cold spots and improving access.

So it really all looks pretty encouraging from the regulator’s point of view with plenty of support for its work, the new draft regulatory framework and the extension of its powers to reward and penalise.

It does look from the White Paper detail that the government intends to use the regulatory system to attempt to improve quality through funding incentives and thereby to encourage desired behaviours including collaborations between universities, between HE and FE as well as increasing specialization. That is a big set of asks.

One of the most intriguing points for me in the White Paper though is the statement that the government, with the OfS, wants to assess the merits of continuing with external examining and “continue to build the evidence base on the effectiveness or otherwise” of the system. This will feed into the programme of OfS reform apparently. It is the sole example of a suggestion I’ve made in the past which appears in the White Paper (although I am sure it is nothing to do with me) and one which I suspect will not be welcomed by many although it is clearly a system which is well past its sell-by date.

It’s really, really hard to regulate quality into education

What all of this assumes, wrongly though, is that if you design the regulatory framework with an ambition to incentivize change you can somehow regulate quality improvements into higher education. So if you have enough rules and procedures set out and if you specify, require submissions, reports and inspections of institutions and provide them with the incentive of additional resources through fees to do things better (or the fear of losing out if they don’t) then the quality of higher education will improve. It won’t.

The pig will not get fatter, no matter how often you weigh it. And an upgrade to the weighing scales is not, I fear, going to deliver all that government wants.