English higher education providers affected by an Office for Students (OfS) decision to pause several of its functions say it will cost them hundreds of wasted hours and contradict efforts to protect the financial sustainability of institutions.
Citing a need to divert resources into its teams working to avert “market exits”, the regulator has shut down all applications to its register until at least August 2025, preventing any more providers from recruiting students who can access government-backed loans.
Institutions hoping to secure their own degree-awarding powers, apply for university title or change their name have also been affected, with only applications deemed to be far enough along the process continuing during the hiatus.
Some of those affected are understood to be considering legal action, citing a significant impact on their plans to develop. Politicians including shadow education minister Neil O’Brien and former universities minister Lord Johnson of Marylebone have also spoken out against the move.
The 40-year-old Institute for Optimum Nutrition applied to join the register in July, seeking to fulfil a long-held goal of opening its degree-level courses up to people unable to self-fund their studies.
Chief executive Chris Mansi said the institute had hoped to have got through the process – which the OfS says should take 12 to 16 weeks – in time for the September 2025 cohort to start and the pause will set it back by at least a year, if not more, as there will likely be a significant backlog when applications reopen.
“By August everything we have supplied will be out of date and we’ll end up having to reapply in effect because we will have to update it all…It seems a bit of a ludicrous position to be in,” she said.
Rachel Hampson, the chair of the institute’s board of trustees, said it had taken the equivalent of a full-time senior staff member working for a year to put together the application.
“It has cost us a lot and cost us in terms of what we’ve not been able to do at the same time,” she said. “There was no notice on this at all. Not only have we spent a lot of time on it, but so has the OfS. I think it is a chronic waste of taxpayer’s money that they now just throw the application out.”
The delay in securing degree-awarding powers was also having an impact. Istituto Marangoni, an Italian school of fashion and design that has a London campus, filed an application seven months ago but is among those that have been told it will not be progressed.
Steep increases in validation fees from partner universities have spurred several institutions to pursue this route recently, said Brooke Storer-Church, chief executive of GuildHE, who cited one example of a provider seeing costs increase from £200,000 a year to £1.5 million meaning any delay represented a “critical financial hurdle”.
An established, well-known university has been trying for two years to achieve research degree-awarding powers but, because it was in the process of resubmitting its application, it has also been told it will be unable to carry on while the pause is in place, affecting its ability to apply for certain funding pots.
Dr Storer-Church said the closing down of the processes – which were already not running efficiently – had shut off one of the few ways providers can evolve and grow their businesses and had “damaged what goodwill the OfS has recently built with parts of the sector”.
She said it did not seem as if the wider repercussions of the decision had been properly understood and there was a sense the move would just store up bigger problems for the future.
Alex Proudfoot, chief executive of representative group Independent Higher Education, said being on the register brought providers autonomy and accountability, pointing out that the move seemed to contradict recent efforts to better regulate subcontracted provision.
He said providers were committed to helping the regulator to improve the process, but it was difficult to see how it will get back on track, with the pause merely adding to the issues.
“Some of our members are extremely angry and are facing risks to multimillion-pound investments having wasted many thousands of pounds and many hundreds of staff hours. Others will have eyewatering additional costs because of the need to revalidate with their university when they were expected to get their own powers before that cycle kicks in again,” he said.
Given the damages being suffered – and the feeling that the OfS was in breach of its statutory duties – there was an appetite to challenge the decision in the courts, according to Mr Proudfoot.
“Ultimately this protects a selective group of providers from financial problems and exposes another group and their students to more problems, but the OfS has a responsibility to regulate the entire higher education sector.
“I think it is a dereliction of duty and morally indefensible. And it is students that will suffer but not the ones necessarily visible to the regulator or general public.”
At the time of the decision, the OfS said it needed to prioritise finite resources and protect students already in the system. The regulator declined to provide any further comment.
