A Panel, a Board and a survey – the OfS is really upping its engagement efforts

The Office for Students (OfS) has just announced the membership of its newly constituted Provider Panel: According to the announcement:

The Provider Panel is a committee of the OfS board and gives advice and constructive challenge on key areas of current and future OfS policy.  

This will also help us more clearly demonstrate our commitment to the Regulators’ Code, which sets out that regulators should provide simple and straightforward ways to engage with those they regulate and hear their views.

The panel is chaired by OfS board member Verity Hancock and consists of 11 expert members who are accountable officers for a range of higher education institutions across England. Senior OfS staff including the Director of Strategy and Delivery and the Director of Regulation also sit on the panel.

Verity Hancock, former Leicester College principal who is charing the Provider Panel, published her thoughts on the developments and has high hopes for its success:

As well as providing useful advice on the risks and opportunities facing the sector and assisting the OfS’s thinking on policy development, we hope the panel’s expert members will help us to better understand how current and future regulation might affect different types of university and college. We’ll be discussing a range of topics, which might include things like governance reform, AI regulation, minimising data burden, the development of a future integrated quality system, registration processes, and financial sustainability.

The Panel in full

This is the full Panel:

There are certainly individuals on there from most parts of the sector. It is unfortunate though that the OfS only appointed Vice-Chancellors/ Principals or chief executives to the panel. The new group would really have benefitted from the insights and expertise of two or three university registrars or secretaries on there to bring some detailed knowledge of regulatory realities to the table. This really is an opportunity missed in my view and risks seriously limiting the effectiveness of the Panel. The new Chair rightly wants the panel to provide “honest, constructive feedback and ask challenging questions” to help the OfS improve. It would be in a much stronger position to do so if its membership were extended to include a few more of those closest to managing the day-to-day regulatory engagement with the OfS, who would be extremely well placed to amplify that honest, constructive feedback. A few more critical friends on the panel would be good for everyone.

And now a survey!

There is more on the engagement front too. The OfS has brought in Savanta to run a new stakeholder survey of Vice-Chancellors:

The survey will provide the OfS with further insights into how it is perceived by universities and colleges and will help the OfS to improve how it engages and communicates with the sector.

The new survey will be open to accountable officers at every institution on the OfS Register, building on previous OfS research gathered through selected interviews.

It does feel like a positive step. Although a lot does depend on the nature of the questions asked and the feedback format allowing for plenty of free text from respondents (unlike the usual tightly constrained OfS consultations on regulatory changes).

Some grounds for optimism

The Provider Panel and this new stakeholder survey, combined with a new Student Board, which looks like it has a bit more heft than its predecessor student panel, and the fact that OfS officers are certainly getting out and about a bit more, all give some grounds for optimism that the OfS is at last getting serious about engagement with the sector. Whether the agency listens to and acts on all the messages it receives from these new channels remains to be seen but the establishment of the Provider Panel (even with the absence of those with the deeper regulatory experience) is a welcome step nevertheless.