As his wide-ranging review of the Office for Students (OfS) was published last summer, the regulator’s former chair, David Behan, concluded that the “golden age of higher education could be over”.

Although he felt that much of his predecessor’s analysis was right, Edward Peck, the man who has taken over from Behan at the watchdog, said this was one part he disagreed with.

“There may have been a real golden age for 50 per cent who got into higher education, but what about the 50 per cent who didn’t go into education at 18?” Peck asked.

Though he is not a big fan of the concept of “golden ages”, the former vice-chancellor of Nottingham Trent University ����������the Labour government’s newly expanded higher education target could lead to a better era for the sector than the one that Behan might have been referring to.

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Peck, who spoke to ����Vlog as the regulator published its latest five-year strategy, said the OfS was also entering a new stage in its existence.

“We are still learning how to regulate higher education, and I think higher education is still learning how to be regulated,” said Peck, who has become just the third permanent chair of the OfS – after Michael Barber and James Wharton – since the organisation was created in 2018.

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“Inevitably, when regulation enters a new sector, there’s going to be a period where you have to develop the rules of engagement, the way in which you work together, and I think we have been through that initial stage.”

Coming from a career in the NHS before academia, Peck said he was surprised that higher education did not have a regulator, and that the OfS was now aiming for a “more overt” approach.

“Most institutions provide a good education to most students most of the time. However, in any sector which is receiving large amounts of public money or is filling a public service, you need to have an organisation that is making sure that is consistently the case.”

He said some institutions fail to do that because of individual weaknesses, while at other times the OfS has to intervene over systemic issues or “ineptitude”.

One example of this “ineptitude” is franchising, on which the OfS has had to act, Peck said. He said institutions have developed relationships with franchisees which are “somewhere on the spectrum from careless to negligent”, and sometimes even fraudulent.

“There are people who will say we mustn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to franchising, to which my response is…there are some babies, there’s quite a lot of bathwater, and some of that bathwater is quite murky.”

Another “own goal” that the sector has committed was around grade inflation, according to Peck. He said its slow response to concerns means the issue has been allowed to “fester”, which has damaged the confidence of both politicians and the public in the quality of degrees.

“There are some things that the sector’s doing which don’t help itself. On both the franchising issue and indeed grade inflation and others, the sector is making work for us and then they’re complaining about the regulatory burden.

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“Well, if you didn’t do things that caused concern in government and amongst the public and the media and therefore for the regulator, you’d have less regulation.”

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The OfS’ updated strategy, which covers the period of 2025 to 2030, also indicated that it plans to play a more hands-on role when it comes to financial issues in the sector.

Although he could not rule out an institution going under, Peck said the likelihood of this happening was reducing with time and that most institutions have seen an improvement in their recruitment of domestic and international students – and have become more realistic in their projections for future growth.

“Our worst fears have probably not been realised. The metaphor I would use is the light at the end of the tunnel has got closer and brighter for the vast majority, and where it hasn’t, there may be other things they can still do or new steps such as thinking about federations or mergers that they now need to pursue.”

Peck acknowledged that this might be “unsettling” for academics who are still concerned about job cuts but said higher education is no different from other sectors facing similar financial pressures on the public purse.

In the recent skills White Paper, the government outlined plans for the OfS to become the primary regulator for both higher education and further education colleges with a HE component, along with more financial monitoring and data collection processes.

These new priorities will be added to what is already a very long list, given the OfS already has a role in tackling sexual harassment, running the Teaching Excellence Framework, protecting free speech, student mental health, and many other issues.

It even previously promised to take action on spelling and grammar in universities as it became overloaded with political priorities under the former government.

Peck said several things had been handed over to the OfS in the past few years that it probably was not expecting, and its task now was to prioritise what is really important.

“Something suddenly appears on the political agenda, [and] the temptation to give it to the OfS to sort out, I think has been taken.”

Peck, who had a “very cordial” relationship with the OfS when he was at Nottingham Trent, said he hopes his background as a vice-chancellor will help the regulator get its message across to his former colleagues – although he admitted this might be “naïve”.

“This is about having a credible and confident regulator, and the sector needs that at the moment. It’s been receiving criticism from all sorts of directions, some deserved and some obviously undeserved.

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“And I think having an organisation that the public, the media, politicians respect as being independent and authoritative…I think it’s really important to the sector and I think that realisation’s starting to now really hit home.”

patrick.jack@timeshighereducation.com