Recommendation 22

The OfS told us that one of the things it became very aware of during the early days of the pandemic was that it did not have the tools needed to intervene quickly if facing a provider failure. It said that, because addressing that issue was urgent, in early 2020 it consulted quickly and introduced a new regulatory condition, effective from 1 April 2021, which enables it to impose directions on providers it considers at material risk of failure. The OfS described to us examples of the sort of directions it might make, including: requiring a provider to specify what it was doing to protect students’ interests; ensuring that students could transfer to a different institution to complete their studies; complete their intended course of study, or complete their current academic year or term and receive an exit award or credit to recognise their achievements with sufficient evidence retained to enable students to demonstrate the credit they had secured; and ensuring that complaints processes and a compensation scheme were in place.42