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“By August everything we have supplied will be out of date and we’ll end up having to reapply in effect because we will have to update it all…It seems a bit of a ludicrous position to be in,” she said.
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 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”.
Alex Proudfoot, chief executive of representative group Independent Higher Education, said: “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.”
At the time of the decision, the OfS said it?needed to prioritise finite resources and?protect students already in the system.
