Gordon McKenzie, CEO, GuildHE, said:

“GuildHE members have always focused on delivering excellent teaching and an outstanding student experience. We welcome the Office for Students’ proposals to ensure all students achieve positive outcomes from higher education. The higher education sector rightly has a reputation for high quality and universities have robust processes to tackle pockets of poor performance. The OfS proposals will support universities to ensure all students receive the same protections.

We welcome the OfS clarification that they will not be creating baselines around salary data and the fact they have listened to sector feedback. and confirmed they will delay indicators for trans-national education (TNE) students until the appropriate data exists and have recognised the challenge that small datasets in some providers creates for making fair judgements.

We also welcome their recognition of the need for contextual factors to be considered alongside the numerical baselines, particularly when it comes to student outcomes and the very real differences in labour market opportunities in different parts of the country. How these judgments are made in practice will be critical and we look forward to seeing more detail from the OfS.

On the TEF, we welcome the focus on enhancement as its primary purpose and the alignment with the OfS’s broader regulatory activities. We particularly welcome the renewed commitment to student engagement through the new student submission and the weight given to the provider narrative in generating other evidence to support the analysis of provider excellence. This will enable TEF assessors to understand the institutional contexts and missions of a diverse sector and ensure students’ views on the quality of their experience are at the heart of every award.”