Office for Students’ University of Sussex humiliation is a symptom of deeper failings

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England’s higher education regulator must rebuild trust with troubled sector after series of blunders under previous leadership

In its brief and unhappy life, England’s Office for Students has been offered a series of challenges it has largely failed to meet. This week the latest and most embarrassing of those was unveiled when the high court decisively rejected the higher education watchdog’s attempts to fine the University of Sussex more than £500,000 for regulatory failings relating to Kathleen Stock’s time as an academic at Sussex.

Stock quit Sussex in 2021, saying she felt ostracised and targeted for her views on gender identity and transgender rights. Here was the highest profile test case that the OfS had seen: a subject of enormous controversy and sensitivity, involving key issues of academic freedom and freedom of speech. But as we now know from Mrs Justice Lieven’s ruling, in its rush to intervene, the OfS managed to tie together its own shoelaces.

The high court hearing revealed that the OfS was eager to make an example of Sussex, to the extent that the court threw out its fine for bias and predetermination along with a string of other jurisdictional failings.

Rather than teaching Sussex a lesson, it was the OfS that ended up with a bloody nose. But the damage goes deeper than that. Susan Lapworth, until recently the OfS’s chief executive, started the ball rolling in 2021 with the Sussex investigation. Nearly five years later, with nothing to show for it, the OfS is still failing to do much for the students in whose name it is meant to regulate.

To take one example: in 2023 the New York Times exposed a number of profitable higher education colleges in England which offered students with few qualifications access to student loans. The numbers enrolled had rocketed in recent years, something a proactive regulator might have noticed. But all the OfS could say at the time was that it was “working to improve partnership data to help improve regulation”.

What about threats to students attending universities registered with the OfS? Phil Brickell, the Labour MP for Bolton West, went public at the end of last year, accusing the OfS of being “asleep at the wheel” in regulating the University of Greater Manchester despite voluminous media coverage – spearheaded by the the Mill in Manchester – of the university’s management malfunctions, bullying and financial issues.

The Mill’s reporting began in February last year, the Greater Manchester police began investigating in March, and the vice-chancellor was suspended in May by the university’s board. It wasn’t until December that the OfS announced its own investigation.

Meanwhile the higher education sector in England is in financial turmoil, with departments closing and academics being made redundant. The OfS response has been to make vague and disturbing statements about scores of higher education institutions being at risk of “exiting the market”, leaving current and future students in the dark.

But there is some good news. The OfS’s bumbling largely took place under previous management. Lapworth recently stood down as chief executive, to be replaced from June by Ruth Hannant and Polly Payne, two experienced civil servants. Their challenge will be to do some regulating where it is needed, and rebuild the OfS’s relationship with the sector.

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• University of Sussex
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