Alternative providers: Navigating the challenges of today’s education landscape

The original objective of having new higher education legislation, as outlined by the Coalition Government seven years ago, was to deliver ‘a level playing field for higher education providers of all types’. Yet the Higher Education and Research Act (2017) has left us with three different sorts of regulated providers.

At ‘Approved (fee cap)’ providers, which include all traditional universities, students may borrow £9,250 a year for their fees and their institutions are subject to a fee cap. At ‘Approved’ providers, which include alternative providers like the University of Buckingham and Regent’s University, students can be charged any fee but may only borrow £6,165. At ‘Basic’ providers, however, students are ineligible for government-backed student loans.

Far from a level playing field, it is a messy and confused picture uncomfortably reminiscent of the TV sketch in which Ronnie Barker played a middle-class man who looked up to the upper-class John Cleese and down on the working-class Ronnie Corbett.

It is not widely understood, but Basic providers cannot recruit international students, secure their own degree-awarding powers or obtain university title. So many of the 120 institutions expected to fall into this category are likely to want to upgrade their status in due course. In addition to the three categories of regulated providers, there will be 482 unregulated providers in 2019/20, many of which are likely to want to change their status too.

The new system does at least light the path that smaller, more specialist and newer providers need to follow if they want to secure the benefits held by more traditional higher education providers, such as their own degree-awarding powers or even university title. In the past, I have noted that running a good-quality alternative provider has felt like competing in a lengthy obstacle course in which the rules keep changing. It is still not going to be an easy or quick process for any provider to join the more tightly regulated categories, but it will perhaps be a little simpler and clearer. Moreover, given the Government’s support for a more diverse higher education sector in which ‘challenger institutions’ compete for students with traditional universities, there is a good deal of political will invested in ensuring the new arrangements prove sufficiently flexible.

The Department for Education’s official figures assume over 230 new providers will opt to become either an ‘Approved (fee cap)’ or an ‘Approved’ provider in the next decade — that is about one a fortnight from 2019/20 to 2027/28.

Providers that currently have less ambitious plans will still need to deal with the huge changes convulsing the sector. Alongside the roll out of the Higher Education and Research Act (2017), there is the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) and the HESA Data Futures programme, which is transforming the collection of data from traditional universities and alternative providers alike. On top of all this, there will be the preparations for Brexit, which at the very least are likely to affect the rules affecting international students. The new Ministers in the Department for Education, Damian Hinds and Sam Gyimah, will no doubt, in time, wish to introduce reforms of their own and the long-promised review of tertiary education funding could take us to places no one has yet predicted.

In this confused landscape, providers need to focus on the quality of their students’ experience in greater detail than ever before. That necessitates assessing and reassessing every part of an institution that comes into direct contact with students and ensuring access to accurate and real-time data about each student’s performance. Those that do not do this are likely to perform poorly against the new measures for assessing quality, including the TEF. But for those that do, they will be able to choose their own destiny, including the regulatory category in which they operate.

One other thing seems certain too: the Higher Education and Research Act is unlikely to be the final word. At some future date, probably after Brexit has come and gone, the different categories of higher education provider will need to be looked at again. At that point, it is likely that those which have made the best of the system currently being rolled out will stand in much better stead than those that have simply put up with it and made as few changes as possible. They will be left playing catch up while their competitors are moving on.

Nick Hillman is the Director of the Higher Education Policy Institute.

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