Recommendation 9

To create and maintain its regulatory independence, and seeking to minimise regulatory burden, the OfS does not maintain close ongoing contact with individual providers it considers at low risk. The OfS explained that it collected “a basic core from every registered university and college” but beyond this it considered its approach was “proportionate to the particular circumstances they face”.17 The National Audit Office reported that the sector bodies and providers it had spoken to told it that, because the OfS had not routinely spoken to most providers, they were not confident that the OfS had all the information it needed to contextualise the financial data it collects. The OfS asserted that it did not recognise that criticism in relation to financial data, as opposed to information about quality. It accepted that there were issues around the burden on providers of collecting this data, and that it was doing a lot of work on that, but that “in terms of us needing this core data, the case is unequivocal”.18 The Department’s oversight of the OfS’s performance