OfS green-lights three-year student caps for TEF poor performers

English universities will no longer be given an overall rating under revised plans for a new Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) but those performing poorly on student outcomes or student experience still face restrictions on their enrolment growth for at least three years.

The Office for Students has announced that it will press on with proposals to limit expansion plans at providers receiving a bronze or requires improvement rating in the revamped exercise, which will run for the first time in 2027-28.

Responding to the results of a consultation on the plans, first announced last September, the OfS said it had agreed that providers should only be given a rating of gold, silver, bronze or requires improvement for each of the two broad categories under assessment – outcomes and experience – rather than an overall rating that combined their scores on both.

According to a document summarising the responses published by the regulator, some people valued the “simplicity and clarity” that overall ratings would bring but a larger proportion were not supportive, questioning “the effectiveness of broad rating judgements more generally in presenting a complete and nuanced picture of a provider’s performance”.

They noted that schools regulator Ofsted has moved away from one-word ratings of late, after criticism that parents and pupils struggled to look beyond the headline findings.

Under the biggest shake-up of the TEF since it first launched, the OfS plans to merge the exercise with its wider quality assessment regime in the hope of providing students with a clearer sense of where the best-quality teaching and learning lies. Ratings will be made public to help inform students’ decision making. 

In a change to the current ratings, in future a bronze award will designate institutions that only meet minimum requirements, and they will face sanctions intended to improve performance.

Chief among these will be the limit applied to student recruitment, which the OfS has decided to implement despite concerns in expressed in the consultation that it was “unfair or disproportionate”, given that those awarded bronze will still be above baseline standards.

“Because we are deliberately defining Bronze as meeting minimum quality requirements rather than high quality, it remains our view that it will serve students’ interests to strongly incentivise Bronze rated providers to improve and deliver consistently high quality,” says the OfS’ response to the findings.

Other respondents said the new regime would result in a “two-tier system” but the OfS said it was “appropriate to reward and reduce regulatory scrutiny for the highest quality providers, and to increase scrutiny and strengthen incentives for providers that are not delivering the high level of quality that students expect”.

However, the regulator indicated that it would offer some flexibility, including not automatically applying restrictions to bronze providers. Those who receive a bronze in one category and a higher mark in the other may also be given more wiggle room. A further consultation on the specifics of the plan will be launched later this year. Whether caps will apply to both domestic and international recruitment is also still to be decided.

Providers with requires improvement ratings will also be prevented from applying for degree-awarding powers (DAPs) or extensions to existing DAPs. Bronze providers could face a similar fate, subject to further consultation.

In further changes that have been green-lighted, the TEF will now apply to all providers registered with the regulator and operate on a cyclical basis, with institutions with lower ratings being assessed more frequently.

Bronze providers will have three years between assessments, meaning any that have been given this rating face at least three recruitment cycles of restricted growth, although the OfS has indicated that it might allow some marginal expansion during this period.

In a bid to avoid the issues seen in the last round of the TEF – when several results were delayed because of provider appeals – the OfS is restricting the right to challenge ratings only to those who receive bronze or requires improvement.

Assessments will draw on data collected for the National Student Survey, as well as other metrics, including continuation and completion rates. Thresholds for progression into employment are being dropped. The OfS had originally planned a bespoke exercise to collect data from providers not currently participating in the NSS but has scrapped this idea and those institutions will no longer receive a student experience rating. It is understood that this affects approximately 100 registered providers.

Undergraduate provision will be assessed in the first cycle, with the regulator looking at postgraduate courses later on. The OfS has elected to assess apprenticeship provision despite this also being looked at by Ofsted.

In one concession to concerns raised in the consultation, the OfS said, when student outcomes fall below a minimum threshold, it would “consider actions a provider has taken to improve outcomes where the impact of those actions is demonstrable” rather than just looking at contextual factors that explain historical performance, as originally planned.

Jean Arnold, interim director of quality and access at the OfS, said the new system was “designed to show how higher education is a force for good”.

The new approach will “help us to focus our efforts on holding institutions that aren’t meeting our minimum requirements to account”, added Arnold, with current and prospective students able to see this information for all registered institutions “at a glance” for the first time.

tom.williams@timeshighereducation.com