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Complaining to the OIA

by GR Evans

The Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA) has stressed in its Annual Report that the system it operates is under strain. The expectation that universities would offer a route for students to make  complaints became a requirement at the turn of the century as  providers began to recognise the existence of a ‘student contract‘. That made the student a ‘consumer’ of the ‘higher education provider’. ‘Complaints procedures’ for students to use began to appear alongside ‘grievance procedures’ for employees. Scrutinising the performance of higher education providers in that task falls to the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA).

The OIA was created as a company in 2003 and began work as a voluntary scheme. It was designated as operator of a student complaints scheme in 2005. Its current ‘members’ are various sector bodies including  Universities UK and GuildHE. Its Board, headed by the actual Adjudicator, and it includes student representatives.

It first needed to show itself to be independent. The OIA faced criticism early on when a petition with 43 signatures, called for its abolition, complaining that it was a ‘biased, unreasonable, and non-impartial organisation. The petition called for:

Full evidence-based investigation into student complaints, fully independent of the University’s internal processes, and in accordance with existing educational and non-educational law,

and ‘a public enquiry into all decisions made against student complaints, by the OIAHE since its inception’, withnew rules:

to provide full legal aid cover for all students whose employment prospects are, or may have been, damaged as a result of their adverse experience with a public educational institution, and who remain unemployed as a result.

This was not followed through in those express terms. The stated objective of the process now followed by the OIA is to ‘put the student back in the position they  would have been in if the problem hadn’t occurred’.

Meeting that demand presents difficulties in two respects. The relationships of students to their ‘higher education provider’ have changed. They are its ‘members’ in the case of Oxford and Cambridge but in other providers a governing body of between twelve and twenty-four constitute the ‘members’ under the Higher Education and Research Act 1992. Elsewhere  they are likely to be, in effect, paying customers ‘buying’ a course. There is a contract and if the providers does not fulfil its part, the student may complain and seek redress in the form of repayment of fees.

A sense of student entitlement may arise from the sheer cost to a student. In England, tuition fees for the academic year 2026-7 will rise to £9,790 for standard full-time courses, £11,750 for full-time accelerated courses and £7,335 for part-time courses, for providers with a Teaching Excellence Framework award and an Access and Participation Plan. That will increase for the year 2027-8 to £10,050 for standard full-time courses, £12,060 for full-time accelerated courses  and £7,530 for part-time courses.  Costs for ‘maintenance’ and accommodation are additional.

The procedures to be followed in making a complaint have needed repeated updating. Key terms have had to be defined. For example, the Annual Report of Oxford’s Sexual Harassment and Violence Support Service reports ‘an increasing complexity of cases, and those requiring a longer duration of support’. Where there is a complaint it recognises the need for clarity as to whether a dispute is a ‘University’ or a ‘college’ matter, noting ‘a marked increase in college-based, student-to-student reports of reported incidents’. The University is therefore improving its provision for training to ensure that those with responsibilities for students are clear about what constitutes ‘consent’.

Nationally, is the system now simply overloaded? The OIA published its Annual Report in April, recording the scale of the  rise in the number of complaints it receives. In 2008 the OIA received 900 complaints against an England and Wales enrolment denominator of 2,117,535 – a rate of 42.5 complaints per 100,000 students. In 2025 there were 4,234 complaints, an increase of 17 per cent from the previous year. The 4,234 complaints in 2025 ‘translate’, it says, ‘to roughly 165.8 per 100,000. in 2025’. In October 2025  alone there had been 516 complaints, recorded as the busiest single month in its history. In the face of this demand the OIA  resolved 3,950 cases within six months and brought the average case handling time down to 81 days.

Stress-points are evident. Its Report notes that the complaints the OIA receives ‘prematurely’ are brought by students who ‘have begun the process but feel that they have waited too long for a decision’:

most of the complaints raised with us prematurely are brought by students who have begun the process but feel that they have waited too long for a decision. Delays are a symptom of a system under strain and may be one impact of the financial challenges facing providers.

Jim Dickinson’s blog for WonkHE on 26 April 2026 pointed to further evidence arguing that the fact that 42% of complainants now disclose a disability could mean a sector which is still structurally unable to accommodate them. So even if the growth in complaints may reflect an increasing sense of entitlement among students, the OIA suggests that the Adjudicator makes recommendations – or requires compensation to be made – that is ‘an indication that a student has not received the service they expect at a time when fees and cost of living pressures are increasing’.

The continuing multiplication of ‘alternative providers’ seems likely to lead to more complaining. They may admit unqualified students and be imperfectly regulated. The OIA publishes a list of ‘case summaries’ on providers where problems have emerged. The ‘worked example’ given in the OIA’s Report is that of Brit College, on which the OIA had already published concerns as of ‘public interest’ in November 2025.

The OIA had made Recommendations and had reported the College’s refusal to comply with its Recommendations to its Board in September 2025 and shared information about the complaint with the Office for Students (OfS), Department for Education (DfE) and Ofqual.  None of this led to reform. Companies House reports that Brit College Ltd is subject to Receiver Action, with its accounts and confirmation statement overdue and apparently heading for liquidation.

There seems, then, to be a question as to the effectiveness of the OIA not in terms of its work but in terms of its powers, where a provider of higher education falls beyond the reach of a complaints procedure.

SRHE member GR Evans is Emeritus Professor of Medieval Theology and Intellectual History in the University of Cambridge.


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A new social contract and a revival in public funding for higher education

by Vincent Carpentier

Longstanding tensions between funding and massification of higher education have significantly intensified, bringing a sense of vulnerability to the system, its institutions, staff, and students. I argue in a recent paper (Carpentier, 2026 – “Is there a case for the revival of public funding in UK higher education? Lessons from history.” Globalisation, Societies and Education, 1–9) that a relentless decline in upfront public funding derailed cost-sharing in higher education, launching a process of public-private substitution with strong implications for sustainability, stability and equity. I connect this shift to the erosion of the post-war consensus initiated by the 1973 crisis and intensified by the 2008 crisis. I discuss how revived public funding towards a reformed higher education system might contribute to and benefit from a revisited welfare state, renewing the social contract away from an increasingly unequal socioeconomic system.

The long retreat of public funding

Public funding was a key driver of the first phase of massification of the 1960s under a binary system shaped by universities and the public sector of higher education spearheaded by polytechnics. Grants to institutions and their students, driven by aligned political, economic, and social rationales, were considered as integral parts of the construction of the welfare state driving the post-1945 social contract.

Figure 1: Income structure of higher education institutions and enrolment (universities only before 1992) UK 1921–2024.

Source: Carpentier, 2026

This public investment peaked at 90% of higher education income in the early 1970s. It was then interrupted by the 1973 crisis which challenged the postwar consensus with supply side lower taxation policies seeking to limit public funding of the social sphere and encourage its privatisation. The translation of that process to higher education led at first to a slowdown in expansion in the 1980s before becoming the template of a much more marketised second phase of massification (under a newly unified system with the polytechnics having become universities in 1992). Cost-sharing – which had started with the introduction of international fees in 1967 and their rise to full-cost in 1981 – was extended to home students with the introduction of loans in 1990 and of £1K means-tested upfront fees in 1998. Differences within the UK are important to consider as Scotland abolished fees in 1999 unlike the other nations (Shattock and Horvath, 2020).

In 2006, home fees tripled to £3K and became deferred, funded by income contingent state-backed loans. What were then called ‘top-up fees’ coincided, as part of a cost-sharing agenda, with sustained grants to institutions and students: however, the share of public funding had already declined to 50% by 2008. The global crisis intensified that decline. Home fees tripled again in 2012 while teaching grants to institutions were largely scrapped in 2010. Grants to students were gradually replaced by loans and suppressed in 2016: public funding only represents 20% of institutional income today (28% if an estimation of non-refunded loans subsidised by the government is included).

Shift from cost-sharing to public/private substitution of funding

I argue that this concomitance of the rise in fees and reduction of grants represents a shift in the dynamic between public and private funding: fees started to replace rather than top up public funding. This process of public/private substitution, which derailed the cost-sharing agenda after the 2008 crisis, had many implications. Firstly, substitutive fees do not generate additional resources and therefore do not address issues of financial sustainability affecting institutions and their staff (Carpentier and Picard, 2024). Moreover, substitution increased the vulnerability of institutions and the whole system which, in the absence of the shield of public funding, became over-reliant on volatile private resources such as home and international fees. Substitution also intensified a longstanding unequal institutional differentiation. The inequalities between universities and polytechnics at the heart of the binary system of the first massification of the 1960s were reproduced by those between pre/post-92 and Russell group universities of the unified system of the second phase of massification (Carpentier 2021).

Substitution also affects equity as higher fees coincided in a context of austerity with the gradual replacement of grants by increasingly less generous loan system with rising repayment costs (Callender, 2017): this deactivated the cost-sharing mechanisms designed to mitigate for the negative impact of fees on access and students’ debt (de Gayardon and Callender, 2025; Ghaffar and Hordósy, 2026). Finally, substitution affects how higher education is or is perceived: lower public funding and higher fees reflecting marketisation (Robertson and Martini, 2023) and hypercommodification (Boliver and Promenzio, 2025) slowly undermined the real and perceived public good of higher education (Marginson and Yang, 2025) while strengthening its conception as a private good. That private good was itself increasingly undermined by a falling graduate premium and unemployment (unequally according to institutions and social capital), aggravated by higher inflation and loan interest rates. Both public and private cases for higher education are now increasingly difficult to make.

Inequalities and the erosion of public services and socioeconomic vulnerabilities

The issues raised by substitution threatening higher education are symptomatic of wider ideological choices regarding the links between economic and human developments that characterised the post-1973 socioeconomic model. That favoured competition over collaboration, the individual over the collective, focusing on public deficit while minimizing private debt, considering social spending as a byproduct of growth rather than an investment. Those approaches shaped the growth model of the 1990s based on deregulated globalisation, financialisation and lower social protection – which generated unsustainable levels of inequality masked by private debt and cheap imported products until the explosion of the subprime market kicked off the 2008 crisis. Inequalities were initially acknowledged as a source of the crisis  (Piketty, 2024) before being overlooked and intensified by austerity policies (Farnsworth and Irving, 2018).

Covid-19 showed (Tooze, 2021) the cost of not having addressed inequalities and the erosion of public services in terms of vulnerabilities of economies and societies but also demonstrated the value of what remained of the welfare state as collective shielding (Carpentier, 2021).  Again, this acknowledgement vanished with the “return to normality”. Stagflation and energy crises are reminders that we ignore the impact of the crisis of neoliberalism on inequalities at our peril, especially as they fuel neonationalist tensions within and between countries. This should lead to reflect on finding another route out of the crisis through a revisited welfare state and to consider how higher education might contribute to it and benefit from it.

A new social contract: transformative crises and the case for countercyclical spending

Is the post-1945 progressive social contract based on the welfare state a one-off historical product of unmatched human and physical destruction? Can socioeconomic transformations addressing inequalities only be triggered by catastrophic events? The human impact on climate change seems serious enough to require a new social contract still nowhere to be seen. Looking back at Kondratiev cycles offer hopeful examples of earlier crises which, unlike 1973 and 2008, were deeply transformative (Carpentier, 2015). The crises of 1833, 1873 and 1929 all triggered countercyclical social spending funded by progressive taxation leading to technological and social innovations. Each crisis revived productivity while reducing inequalities and incrementally transformed the socio-economic system and crystallised into the post-war consensus (Fontvieille and Michel, 2002).

A revival of fair taxation today to finance countercyclical spending might be the opportunity to drive a new social contract correcting an unsustainably unequal socioeconomic system characterised by the emergence of technological innovations without social transformations and regulations protecting people, their economy, society, and environment. Higher education should contribute to that change alongside other levels of education (Scott, 2021) and the whole social sphere. Reversing public/private substitution through revived grants to institutions and students is urgent to ensure that higher education shifts its focus from its own unsustainability and instability to tackle inequalities and address the interrelated political, economic, social and environmental challenges ahead (Carpentier and Unterhalter, 2022; McCowan, 2025). Rebalancing the funding of higher education is about realigning its economic and other rationales (Ashwin et al, 2026) and reviving a public service of higher education anchored to a revisited welfare state able to drive a renewed social contract reconciling economies and societies.

Vincent Carpentier is Professor of Higher Education and Society at the UCL Institute of Education. His teaching and research activities are located at the interface of history of education and political economy. His comparative research explores the historical relationship between educational systems, Kondratiev cycles and social change. He is particularly interested in exploring the long-term connections and tensions between funding, expansion and institutional differentiation of higher education systems at both national and global levels.

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What will the Office for Students do now?

by Rob Cuthbert

SRHE News Editorial, April 2026

The Office for Students has had a significant reset, after it was heavily criticised, not just by the HE sector, but also in a coruscating report by the House of Lords Industry and Regulators Committee in 2023. That report said “the regulator had a poor relationship with both students and providers, and that it lacked independence from the government.” In January 2024 the National Audit Office produced a scathing report on student finance in franchised providers, and Sir David Behan was commissioned to produce an independent review of the Office for Students, published in July 2024 as Fit for the Future: Higher Education Regulation Towards 2035. After the general election in 2024 the new Labour Government replaced the Chair of the OfS, former Conservative MP Lord Wharton, appointing Edward Peck CBE, the widely-experienced former VC at Nottingham Trent in March 2025. Peck had been appointed by DFE as the first Higher Education Student Support Champion in 2022, so might be seen as bipartisan. OfS chief executive Susan Lapworth left at Easter 2026, and John Blake, Director for Fair Access and Participation, left in 2025 to join Wonkhe’s new venture The Post-18 Project, replaced on an interim basis by his widely-respected predecessor Chris Millward.

There are now almost 500 OfS staff, about twice as many as the Higher Education Funding Council for England had when it was disbanded. The Chief Executive has a leadership team comprising eight ‘Directors’ and another 13 ‘Senior leaders’; it is difficult for outsiders to understand exactly who is responsible for what. There are Directors for: Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom; Quality and Access; Strategy and Delivery; Regulation, and Enabling Regulation; Resources and Finance (2); and Legal Counsel (but, mysteriously, not the Director of Fair Access and Participation). The ‘Senior Leaders’ are Heads of: Interventions; Monitoring; Student Equality and Welfare; Financial Sustainability; Enforcement; Quality and Standards; Communications; Market Entry; Chief Data Officer; Student Outcomes; Provider Governance; Consumer Protection; Pathways and Funding.

If only most problems would fit into those pigeonholes – there must be a lot of day-to-day negotiation about who leads on which issues. With 500 staff there is scope to give every one of the 424 institutions under OfS regulation a different contact person, without even troubling the 22-strong leadership team, but perhaps that would just be too easy to understand. Behan’s 25th recommendation was “That the OfS develops a more transparent style of communications to demonstrate to the sector its independence from government.” It could start with more communication about staff and how the organisation is supposed to work.

New chair Peck wasted no time in recasting the OfS strategy to take account of the many criticisms of the OfS. After the Lords inquiry the Behan review called for a narrower focus on key priorities, and the Strategy for 2025-2030 said the OfS goals were “grouped into three areas”: quality; student experience and support; and sector resilience. Equality of opportunity was “woven into everything we do”. Peck chose four phrases to capture the approach:

  • “Ambitious for all students from all backgrounds”
  • “Collaborative in pursuit of our priorities and in our stewardship of the sector”
  • “Vigilant about safeguarding public money and student fees”
  • “Vocal that higher education is a force for good, for individuals, communities and the country”

The OfS announced on 30 March that Ruth Hannant and Polly Payne had been appointed as the new CEO of the OfS, job-sharing as they did as Director-General at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, after previously being DCMS interim Permanent Secretary during 2023. They also job-shared as Director of Higher Education in the DfE from 2014-2017. Josh Fleming, current director of strategy and delivery at the OfS, will be interim chief executive until Hannant and Payne take up their new role on 15 June 2026. How will they make the new strategy work? What will be at the top of their agenda?

Their first problem is that the Office for Students, because of its name and remit, has a Strategy which can only deal obliquely with the most pressing and interconnected problems facing English HE: finding a way to finance HE sustainably (and sorting out the student loans row) and finding a way to cope with the many failures of the statutory HE market. Issues of academic freedom, freedom of speech and the once-ubiquitous culture wars may now be receding in prominence; at least, that will be the hope on all sides. Financing and markets will be the primary concern of the DfE’s promised review of HE finance, but there is no reason to suppose it will appear soon. Chancellor Rachel Reeves recently declared that the student loans issue was not top of her agenda. This gives scope for the new brooms at the OfS to rearrange the HE furniture in ways which may guide the DfE development of workable proposals.

The NAO issued a damning report on 7 December 2017 on The higher education market. It said that, if HE had been a financial product, they would be complaining of mis-selling by universities. But the NAO’s deeper criticism was of the idea that HE could be treated as a market at all, with the report listing all the ways that the market and its regulation fell short of what was necessary and desirable. The new chief executive(s) at OfS were in charge of HE at the DfE from 2014-2017. They must have been closely involved with the NAO investigation, but even more closely involved in the passage of the Higher Education Act 2017, which created a statutory HE market and the Office for Students.

Markets, student tuition fees and higher education financing have been inextricably linked since 2017. The Labour government in 2006 raised undergraduate full-time fees from £1000pa to £3000pa and created income-contingent loans as a means of repayment. In the 2010 general election a new Coalition government faced the perennial question of how to finance mass HE. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg had made a very public pre-election ‘pledge’ to abolish undergraduate fees, but instead  the government tripled them, to £9000 pa from 2012. Deciding exactly how to make it work proved to be rather tricky. David Willetts, the universities minister in BIS, repeatedly promised an HE Bill setting out new policy, but it took years to arrive, prompting scepticism if not ridicule. Willetts declared that markets would “drive up quality” in HE. The hare had been running on ‘low quality courses’ even before Labour HE minister Margaret Hodge complained about ‘Mickey Mouse courses’ in universities (so the hare was really Bugs Bunny). Willetts believed that HE institutions would choose to set fees in a range from £6000-9000, reflecting their supposed ‘competitiveness’ in the market. Every university, of course, understood that price signals quality and accordingly set fees at £9000. From that moment the HE market – as imagined by statute – was dead.

Nevertheless the 2017 Higher Education and Research Act institutionalised the economic idea that markets and regulation are the answer to effective performance of the whole HE sector, even though Willetts’ Special Adviser Nick Hillman always knew that “Straight comparisons between regular markets and educational markets don’t actually make much sense.”, as he said in response to the 2017 NAO report.  By 2017 Willetts had been replaced by Jo Johnson (later ennobled by his brother Boris), who doubled down on the script about “low-quality courses”, as did most of his many successors, with the honourable exception of Chris Skidmore.

Behan’s review said:

“I am of the view that higher education is not a ‘pure’ or ‘perfect’ market, but rather a ‘quasi-market’. Some of the reasons for this include:

• There is a complex relationship of choice between the student and the provider whereby students’ choices are dictated not solely by their preferences, but also by their expectations at being accepted/rejected by the provider.

• Government not only sets the price of a domestic undergraduate course that a provider can charge, but also heavily funds the sector through student loans.

• There are numerous and significant cross-subsidies between cohorts of students. 

• There are significant asymmetries of power and information between providers and students. Taking on a student loan and pursuing higher education is likely to be the biggest contract new undergraduate students will ever have entered.” 

With that list of deficiencies, calling HE a ‘quasi-market’ was charitable, even if – at a stretch – it reflected academic thinking. HE providers responded to the market in various ways, many eventually frowned on or outlawed. After 2010 new ‘challenger institutions’ expanded sub-degree business courses in London, exploiting the income from students able to gain £9000 tuition fee loans – money paid direct to institutions. They grew so much that in 2013 23 private colleges were suspended from student loans eligibility by the DfE. Government didn’t want that kind of response to market demand.

As universities increasingly suffered from rising cost but frozen tuition fees, many saw international student recruitment as the answer. Increasing numbers of universities outside London decided to open a London campus to exploit the overseas market, but were and still are criticised for it. The sector’s broad reliance on optimistic projections for international recruitment was deemed unsustainable and too risky. Government didn’t want that kind of response to market demand – but it decided to cash in anyway, with a levy on institutions for every international student recruited. Meanwhile some institutions thought they could still tap into new demand by expanding franchise relationships with partner colleges, but some of the largest of these have also now been discouraged or discredited. Government didn’t want that kind of response to market demand either.

Despite the downturn in franchising some people made a lot of money. Mike Ratcliffe noted on his MoreMeansBetter blog that the for-profit London School of Commerce had been “… incredibly profitable, with over £100 million paid in dividends to the family that own it.” He asked “Surely we can’t allow companies to stop being providers but to hang onto tens of millions in cash or other assets if either there have been a majority of non-genuine students or only a fraction of genuine students have completed their courses?”. It seems there were Mickey Mouse students as well as Mickey Mouse courses. Elsewhere, responsible HE institutions faced increasing financial problems as their real income fell precipitously. That line in the OfS strategy about resilience has a lot of work to do, and the OfS should look again at Behan’s recommendation “That the OfS board reviews its risk appetite framework and approach with a view to becoming more proactive in anticipating, identifying, and responding rapidly to address emerging risk.” After all, the new Strategy says; “We intervene where we have concerns that public money is not being used as intended …”

Students have repeatedly pronounced themselves largely satisfied with their course experiences in successive National Student Surveys, but this did little to quell the politicians’ and media obsession with course quality. The 2017 Act envisaged a Designated Quality Body to work with the OfS, the QAA was accordingly designated, but the OfS set increasingly restrictive conditions which the QAA ultimately deemed incompatible with its international role and credibility. The House of Lords Industry and Regulators Committee

“… expressed concern about the circumstances surrounding the QAA’s de-designation … The QAA … “blamed” this suspension on the “OfS’ regulatory approach”. The committee said it was “concerning” that England’s regulatory framework had “shifted away from European standards” because it had the potential to damage the international reputation of England’s HE sector. … it was unclear if the OfS had the capability to take on the role previously carried out by the QAA. It called on the regulator to align its framework with international standards and to appoint the QAA or another arms-length body to perform the quality assurance role.”

The OfS instead formed an apparently permanent intention to conduct quality investigations itself, defying the explicit intention of the 2017 Act. OfS now has many Senior Leaders with a finger in the pie, presumably including those for Interventions, Monitoring, Enforcement, Student Outcomes, and Consumer Protection, but most of the others might have grounds to join in.

The quality investigations by OfS generally reach conclusions much too late to benefit the students whose experience prompted the investigations. The OfS strategy says: “We will help drive improvement across the sector, recognising that while much provision is already excellent, there is room to improve further. And we will hold institutions to account when they fall short.” So far the OfS investigations have focused on newer providers or universities near the bottom of the pecking order. The OfS has not, for example, investigated the very public problems with veterinary courses at Cambridge. In those as in many others it seems that institutional self-regulation can deliver better and quicker results.

Those with long memories will recall the opposition of the pre-1992 universities to any incursions by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate, as it then was, which had the run of post-1992s. But HMI were able exactly to be “proactive in anticipating, identifying, and responding rapidly to address emerging risk.” Perhaps the OfS should not only reappoint a DQB but also look around for an independent and respected cadre of, say, His Majesty’s Inspectors. Behan said: ”The OfS should develop its regulatory model to create a virtuous policy circle with the objective of driving improvements in the quality of the higher education sector, and thus acting in the interests of students. The OfS and higher education providers should regard quality improvement as their common shared goal.”

English HE continues to be highly respected and in demand worldwide, but time is running out. The ‘narrow reputational range’ acclaimed by David Watson is jeopardised by misbehaviour by some new providers, misjudgments by a handful of institutions in desperate financial straits, and cutbacks  everywhere. Nevertheless, the National Student Survey shows that students continue to be broadly satisfied, while identifying particular problems such as feedback which institutions have worked hard to address. Some in the media persist in asking “Is higher education worth it?” by highlighting graduate debt, but student demand remains doggedly high. This suggests that you really can’t buck the market, and what we need is the right kind of review to deal with the student loans row and make higher education finances sustainable. In this the OfS has a huge role to play: the new OfS Chief Executives have to transform how the OfS works, to live up to this optimistic but necessary condition for success: “We will deliver our work in collaboration with students and the institutions we regulate. Accepting there will be issues on which we disagree, we will cultivate relationships based on mutual respect, confidence and trust. We will work with student bodies, sector agencies and other partners that share responsibility for stewardship of this important sector to support a cohesive regulatory environment and foster a thriving ecosystem equipped to create opportunity and drive growth. We will champion the many benefits of higher education for society, culture and the economy and regulate in a way that enables universities and colleges to drive growth, create opportunity, champion free expression and support a flourishing society.”

Rob Cuthbert is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner,Practical Academics rob.cuthbert@btinternet.com. X/Twitter @RobCuthbert. Bluesky @robcuthbert22.bsky.social.


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End of the road for higher education student loans?

by Gavin Moodie

Although we’ve come to the end of the road

Still, I can’t let go

As an expat Aussie I have been sad to see the unremitting erosion of public support for what is arguably Australia’s most innovative modern higher education export, income contingent student loans. While Australian student financing may not yet be as ‘unsustainable’ as England’s, the former Labor leader and current vice chancellor of the University of Canberra Bill Shorten argued that Australian universities are in a ‘political cul-de-sac’, with ‘a tired funding model’.

This blog seeks to understand how Australia’s higher education finance reached its Neighbourly cul-de-sac Ramsay Street, why it is perhaps not yet quite unsustainable, and the difficult choices confronting policy makers over the next 5 to 10 years in Australia, England, and elsewhere in the UK.

Introduction and early years: 1989 – 1996

The national Australian Labor Government introduced substantial tuition fees accompanied by income contingent loans in 1989 on the recommendation of the Committee on Higher Education Funding chaired by the astute late Neville Wran, former Labor premier of Australia’s biggest state, New South Wales. A consultant to the committee was Bruce Chapman, an advocate for income contingent loans for higher education and a range of other public policy problems such as farmers’ drought relief and penalties for insider trading and other white collar crimes.

The Wran committee recommended that total student charges should be about 20% of estimated costs in 8 categories of disciplines, which it aggregated into 3 contribution levels. While the Government agreed that student contributions should be about of 20% of system costs, it introduced a single price that avoided the complexities of students paying different rates for different subjects, and the possibility that higher charges may discourage students from enrolling in higher cost courses.

The Wran Committee also recommended an employers’ training levy, which was similar to the UK’s apprenticeship levy except that it could be spent on any form of employee training. Australia’s training guarantee was reasonably successful, but it was vociferously opposed by at least some employers and the Government discontinued it in 1994 after only 4 years of operation. This is consistent with employers’ long term substantial cuts to their induction and development of their own employees in Australia and Canada, as well as the UK.

Government charges by cost and expected income: 1997 – 2004

In 1997 the newly elected conservative Australian Government cut funding to higher education and increased student charges to about 40% of the presumed cost of higher education. The Government established 3 bands of student charges based on a combination of the presumed cost of subjects and graduates’ expected earnings.

In the lowest band were humanities and social sciences that were funded at a lower rate and whose graduates had lower earnings. Also in band 1 were languages and the creative arts. These were higher-cost disciplines, but most graduates’ earnings were lower than average.

In band 3 were disciplines with high costs and high graduates’ earnings: dentistry, medicine, and veterinary science. Also in band 3 was law: it was a low-cost discipline but graduates had high earnings. Band 3 charges were 1.7 times band 1 charges. All other disciplines were in band 2 which were charged 1.4 more than band 1: health, science, and engineering because they were high cost; and business because graduates had high incomes.

University fees by cost, expected income, and Government priorities: 2005 – 2020

From 2005 the Conservative Government changed student contributions from Government charges to institutions’ fees, and established four maximum fee amounts. It introduced a new fee band for the expensive STEM disciplines and for business which is funded at the base rate but has high graduate incomes, though lower than law which was still in the top band.

The Government also published government contribution amounts in 12 bands. The combination of maximum fee amounts and government contribution amounts gave total financing in eight bands. Agriculture, dentistry and medicine were in the highest financing band, which was 2.6 times the lowest band for business and humanities.

The Government also sought to influence students’ behaviour by setting low maximum fee amounts and to influence institutions’ behaviour by setting higher government contribution amounts for the ‘national priority’ disciplines of education and nursing. Institutions’ total revenue for education was 1.2 times the base rate and 1.5 times for nursing.

Job-ready graduates: 2021 –

In 2021 the then Conservative government further cut higher education funding and increased maximum student fees to be a weighted average of about half of total teaching financing, although this differs markedly by discipline, as we shall see. The Government also extended its attempts to influence both students and institutions’ behaviour with financial incentives intended to create ‘job-ready graduates’.

The Government set the lowest student fees for agriculture, education, English, foreign languages, mathematics and statistics, and nursing. It added humanities and most social sciences to business and law in the top fee rate of 3.7 times the base rate. Humanities and social sciences students now pay annual fees 28% higher than dentistry and medicine students, whose maximum fees are 2.9 the base rate.

The Government’s contribution is lowest for business, humanities and social sciences, and law; it is highest for agriculture, dentistry, medicine, and veterinary science, which is 24.6 times the base rate.

The combination of maximum student fees and Government contributions generates total financing for dentistry, medicine, and veterinary science 2.5 times the base rate for business, humanities and social sciences, and law. Total financing for engineering and science is 1.6 times the base rate.

Students pay markedly different proportions of the total financing for their courses. Business, humanities and social sciences, and law students pay 93% of the total financing of their course; engineering, science and medicine pay around 30% of their course’s financing; and education, languages, mathematics, and nursing students pay around 20% of their course’s financing.

These differences are widely considered unfair. It is also doubtful that they have changed students’ and institutions’ behaviour as they were designed to. Humanities and social sciences enrolments have fallen since the introduction of job-ready graduates, but that has continued a long established trend likely influenced by other factors such as prospective students’ interests and perceptions of employment prospects.

Enrolments in English and other languages have fallen even more than the humanities and social sciences, despite the government cutting their fees by 40%. An econometric study concluded ‘Overall, we estimate that the studied policy change led 1.52% of students to demand courses they wouldn’t have demanded under the old fee structure’.

This is entirely consistent with economic theory and Australia’s experience with its previous changes to students’ fees. The whole point of income-contingent loans is to insulate students from the up-front price of education, and that is just what they do, even when humanities’ students fees were increased by 113% and creative arts students’ fees were increased by 64%.

The Australian Labor government was elected in 2022 on a platform that included reversing job-ready graduates, and it was re-elected in 2025 with the same commitment. Yet Labor has kept job-ready graduates for longer than the previous conservative government, to the intense annoyance of many students and staff.

Debts, interest rates, return on investment

The size of Australian Government debt was a concern in the early years of income contingent loans when enrolments and thus accumulated unpaid debt was growing strongly and there were relatively few graduates yet in well-paying jobs repaying their debt. It is not such a big concern now: outstanding student debt is equivalent to 8% of all Australian government debt, which is around 50% of gross domestic product (in contrast to the UK where government debt is 101% of GDP).

The proportion of student debt not expected to be repaid increased from 16% to 25% from 2010 to 2016. However, this is sensitive to repayment conditions, and for 2024 the proportion of new debt not expected to be repaid was 12%.

The size of students’ debts has been concerning. Graduates’ average debt is currently about 30% of average annual earnings and takes just over 10 years to repay. But this varies greatly by individual circumstances. We have seen that the Government has set the maximum fee for arts subjects in the top band, meaning that arts graduates are likely to incur a total debt of half average annual earnings. Arts graduates have lower incomes than other graduates, and many are women who work part time at times during their career. Many are likely to take up to 40 years to repay their debt, if at all.

Graduates’ expected earnings was one of the Australian Government’s criteria for setting maximum student fees, and that remains the only explicitly progressive part of Australia’s student loans. The Australian Government charges interest on student debts, but only to preserve the debts’ real value. Australia does not charge higher income earners higher interest on their student debts, although they may have to repay their debt more quickly than lower paid graduates, as higher paid graduates are required to repay higher amounts each year than lower paid graduates.

Nevertheless, as in England, during a period of high inflation there has been controversy over which of the several measures of inflation to use, and when indexation should be assessed. Also as in England, there have been reports of new graduates’ annual repayments not even covering annual interest charges so their debt continues to increase. Accordingly the Labor Government promised to make repayment conditions more favourable to students, and to cut graduates’ debts once by 20%. Cutting graduates’ debt has been popular, despite being arbitrary and regressive, and arguably contributed to Labor’s re-election in a landslide in 2025.

Despite Australian students’ concerns about fees, debts, and interest rates, graduates have high economic returns, although these vary by gender and discipline.

Substantial differences from England

Further substantial differences between Australian and English higher education have important implications for student fees and loans in each country. The Australian Government retains student number controls. It removed number controls in 2012, some three years before most student number controls were removed for England in 2015/16. Australia introduced its so-called ‘demand driven system’ after a period of pent up demand for higher education, which saw very big increases in enrolments as enrolment caps were removed.

At the time the Australian Government provided about 60% of the financing for each student place, and of course it provided all of the up-front funds for student loans, so the demand driven system substantially increased Government spending on higher education. This was too much for the Australian Government, which ended the demand driven system and reintroduced number controls in 2017. One of the outcomes is that the Australian Government may limit increased expenditure on higher education by limiting its expansion, and not just by worsening students’ loan conditions.

Most Australian higher education students live with their parents. Nearly 80% of Australian higher education students commute from home, even to elite universities. While the proportion of UK 18-year-olds commuting from home is increasing, it is still only 30%. Living in purpose built student housing is a very different experience from commuting from home, and is probably one of the reasons for the UK’s unusually and commendably high student retention and completion rates. Commuting rates also has implications for institutions’ range of programs, which need to be reasonably comprehensive to meet the needs of local students. But a great advantage of commuting is that it greatly reduces students’ living costs, and thus their need for income support.

Universities’ social licence

An important limitation of Australian universities’ financing is their erosion of their social licence. A longstanding concern has been with Australian vice chancellors’ very high pay, amongst the highest in the world for public universities. The average Australian vice chancellor’s pay is almost double the Prime Minister’s. More recently there has been concern at the number of highly paid executives employed by universities: ‘More than 300 Australian university executives make more money than state premiers’. Closely related are complaints at universities’ changed governance, known broadly as the imposition of managerialism.

The very high pay and conditions of Australian universities’ senior executives is in almost feudal contrast to the very high number of academics they engage on precarious employment conditions. Australian universities’ staffing data collection and reporting are very weak on this issue, but the union estimates that about 45% of public Australian university employees are on casual contracts. This is related to widespread underpayment of casual staff.

As in the UK, Canada, and elsewhere, Australian universities have relieved their public funding pressures by recruiting high numbers of international students. Some 35% of Australia’s higher education students are international, 80% of whom live in Australia on a temporary entry permit. There are the familiar concerns that Australian universities lower standards to recruit and graduate large numbers of international students who crowd locals out of accommodation, all to fund senior executives’ lavish pay. Accordingly, the Australian Government is cutting the number of international students. Regardless of the merits of these arguments, there is little public sympathy for increasing universities’ funding from their current three main sources: government grants, domestic student fees, and international student fees.

Difficult choices for policy makers

The late great sociologist of higher education Martin Trow observed that:

“No society, no matter how rich, can afford a system of higher education for 20 or 30 percent of the age grade at the cost levels of the elite higher education that it formerly provided for 5 percent of the population.”

That observation applies equally as we transition to universal participation of more than 50% in post-school education, from mass participation of from 16% to 50% which our countries financed by income contingent loans. That is to say, the current pressures on higher education financing will not be relieved, as some have suggested, just by cutting the number of senior university administrators and their pay, allocating more funds to higher education from increasing taxes on the rich or on companies, or by increasing student fees.

I suggest that there are two main options. The most frequently suggested, especially in England, is to retreat from universal and even mass participation in higher education by cutting greatly the number of higher education students. A second commonly suggested option is to cut radically the cost of providing higher education.

Advocates of each option need to address two consequential issues. To what extent would the much smaller or cheaper system retain stratified elite, mass and universal parts, as Trow envisaged? Secondly, how would access to the elite, mass and universal parts of the system be allocated? I would answer these questions by considering the relative importance I would give to egalitarianism, and to expensive forms of higher education such as research intensity.

Gavin Moodie is Honorary Research Fellow, University of Oxford Department of Education. He worked at 6 Australian universities over 38 years. @GavinMoodie. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gavin-Moodie


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Reconceptualising transnational education through decolonial approaches

by Nilakshi Das

Transnational Education (TNE) represents a rapidly expanding form of cross-border provision, underpinned by an economic imaginary that positions the UK as a ‘key player’ in the global higher education market. While earlier internationalisation strategies focused primarily on bringing overseas students to Britain, TNE reflects a shift towards delivering British higher education to students globally through offshore provisions. The rapid expansion of TNE has elicited growing academic debate about its potential to reproduce the political, economic and epistemic hegemony of the Global North, reinscribing earlier colonial hierarchies and patterns of dependency.

Before the emergence of TNE, the internationalisation of UK higher education was primarily organised through the academic mobility of overseas students, shaped by Britain’s imperial and post-imperial educational networks. During the 1960s, technical assistance programmes and scholarship schemes, such as the Commonwealth Scholarship programme, facilitated student mobility to British universities. In the 1970s, as overseas student numbers gradually increased, differential student fees were introduced alongside tightening immigration regulations, a shift that continued throughout the Thatcher government in the 1980s into the present day. By the late 1990s, the University of Nottingham had established one of the earliest overseas branches, with the general idea that the curriculum in the host country would largely mirror the home institution. From the 2000s onwards, TNE expanded in scope and provision through franchised programmes, joint and dual degrees, distance and online courses in new markets, particularly across the Middle East and Asia. These arrangements allowed UK universities to expand their global presence and competitiveness beyond traditional overseas student recruitment.

Political economy of TNE and latest policy ambitions

The latest articulation of TNE goals includes the Labour government’s new strategy for national renewal by ‘turbocharging education’ as an engine for economic growth, with a target of £40 billion in education exports by 2030. This decision reflects increasing political pressure to cut net migration by reducing overseas student recruitment. Recent policy recommendations have radically argued that universities should be ‘selling education, not immigration’, with growing concerns that student visas are being used as a backdoor route into the UK labour market. Against broader anxieties around immigration in which international students are repositioned as migration liabilities, TNE offers a politically viable solution by exporting education in favour of substituting inward student mobility. As universities’ budgets shrink due to ongoing visa restrictions for international students, TNE engagements are expected to further increase (Hartmann and Lee, 2026).

According to the latest data, the number of students studying entirely overseas through UK TNE increased by 8% in 2024/25, and has risen by 37% since 2020/21. TNE student numbers are now close to the number of international students studying in the UK, with approximately one in six students in UK HE being educated across overseas campuses. Yet, despite this rapid growth, there is a lack of public data on student experiences at TNE. While aggregate data records the number of students enrolled in TNE programmes and level of education, there is limited publicly available information on student progression, degree outcome and labour market prospects. The experiences of students and educators involved in these programmes often tend to remain marginal within UK policy debates.

As higher education increasingly operates through a ‘big business’ model, institutional priorities have rapidly shifted towards generating revenue and maintaining competitiveness. In doing so,commitments to uphold student welfare, equality, and meaningful international collaboration are often sidelined in favour of positional advantage. Therefore, the expansion of TNE under growing market competition raises further pressing questions about equity and power within global HE systems.

Towards a decolonial approach to TNE

Most of the latest policy and institutional analyses of TNE tend to adopt an instrumentalist perspective focusing on business indicators, such as risk assessment, return on investment, international branding and reputation, quality assurance and transnational management strategies. As a result, TNE is mainly understood through frameworks of foreign investment and transnational service delivery further entrenching the logic of the market that frames education as a tradable commodity rather than a global public good (Lauren Clarke, 2021). While these considerations are important for universities operating in a competitive global environment, they risk overshadowing broader questions about equity, inclusion and the social purposes of higher education.

Adopting a decolonial approach to TNE can help address questions around embedding Western systems and structures of education in the Global South. Debates around the coloniality of TNE are not entirely new. Some scholars have drawn parallels between contemporary TNE arrangements and colonial models of education between the 16th and the 19th centuries. Colonial education systems were often characterised by limited access for the local population, a lack of relevance to local realities, the marginalisation of indigenous knowledge systems, the exclusive use of English as the primary medium of instruction, institutional authority with control originating from colonial centres and limited curricula featuring vocational degrees (Teferra and Altbach, 2004). TNE arrangements have been articulated as operating through a similar binary model in which a ‘core’ of sending institutions from the West sets the agenda for a marginalised ‘periphery’ of receiving partners, perpetuating historical legacies of colonialism (Caruana and Montgomery, 2015).

Against this background, there are growing calls for more introspective approaches to TNE that challenge post-colonial structures of dependence and compliance, while remaining attentive to the risk that transnational partnerships may reproduce these hierarchies through networks of alliance with local elites in host countries. Ravindra Sidhu advocates an ‘engaged pedagogy’ and an ‘ethics of care’ in the design and governance of TNE partnerships, emphasising the need to recognise the histories, aspirations and agency of local communities involved in these programmes.

Drawing insights from postcolonial and decolonial scholarship that emphasise justice, inclusion and agency will enable TNE strategies to better examine their implications on student success, outcomes and experiences as well as their wider impact on local communities and higher education systems in host countries. At the same time, greater attention to the national and cultural contexts in which TNE operates, particularly where differing political and institutional norms raise ethical challenges around academic freedom, governance and accountability, can support more informed institutional decision-making and partnerships. These perspectives will ensure that the expansion of TNE is not guided by short-term commercial imperatives but by broader commitments to equity and responsible global engagement, avoiding polarised strategic approaches (Sanderson, 2023).

Nilakshi Das has recently completed her PhD in History of Science. Her PhD was funded by the ESRC and jointly undertaken at the University of Leicester and the University of Warwick. Nilakshi holds an MSc in Education from the University of Oxford and an MA in Sociology from the University of Manchester, funded by a Commonwealth Scholarship. She is a Fellow of the Institute for Historical Research.

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Weekend read: What you need to know to make sense of the row about student loans

by Rob Cuthbert

In January and February the mainstream media were full of stories about the unfairness of student loans and the burdens on graduates facing huge debts and effective tax rates of more than 50%. They cut through in a way that the long-running stories about universities’ financial problems had not, and even dominated Parliamentary questions to the Prime Minister (PMQs) on 25 February 2026. But student loan repayments and universities’ financial problems are two sides of the same coin – how to finance mass higher education. The political debate about student loans is a case study in how almost everyone who didn’t know enough got almost everything wrong at first, until more realism gradually emerged.

Under Labour governments from 1997 there was a heated but, by comparison, measured debate about the costs of higher education, and who should pay for it. As HE participation rates soared from 10% towards 40-50% the international consensus was that it was reasonable for students or graduates to bear some of the cost. Higher education benefited society but also individuals who enjoyed a ‘graduate premium’ of higher lifelong earnings. Nevertheless, when the £1000 undergraduate tuition fee was raised to £3000 in 2003 it nearly brought down the Labour government. That probably represented about half of the total cost at that time. Students were of course vehemently opposed to fees, but for some in HE it felt about right to share the costs equally between students and general taxation.

Demand for HE continued to rise but total costs were controlled because government still determined total student numbers. Then came the Coalition government of 2011 with its determination to make higher education a market. The Liberal Democrats reversed their pre-election pledge to abolish student fees, instead agreeing as part of the coalition to triple fees to £9000. And government abolished its control on total student numbers. Universities Minister David Willetts claimed that student choice would “drive up quality”, but he, almost alone, expected a spectrum of fees from £6000-9000 to emerge. Everyone else realised that price would be the loudest signal of quality, and almost every university went for £9000.

The £9000 fee probably covered most of the costs of undergraduate tuition, although some grant funding remained for specialist high-cost courses, and Oxbridge complained that for them £13000 was the break-even figure. £9000 became the highest nationwide tuition fee in the world, and England still enjoys that dubious world-leading position. To keep higher education accessible to all, in theory at least, new arrangements were needed to make HE affordable at the point of delivery, with the cost being partly paid by students after graduation.

Under the new student loan system graduates would start to make repayments once their salary was above a specified threshold. Their debt would increase at a specified rate additional to the Retail Prices Index (RPI). The total repayments each month were capped, so most graduates would never repay their total debt, but any remaining debt was wiped out after 30 years. The explicit intention was that both fees and salary thresholds would rise with inflation.

This means that student loans are not like commercial loans. The system was never designed to get all the money back. It was designed to be progressive, like income tax, so that among graduates “those with the broadest shoulders”, as the Prime Minister likes to say, should bear a greater share of the repayment burden. In 2012 it was intended that the system should deliver about 72% of the total cost in repayments. The unmet cost (government subsidy) was known as the Resource Accounting and Budgeting (RAB) charge.

Almost immediately the RAB charge began to rise above its planned level, and the government soon found it necessary to restrict enrolments in many new ‘challenger’ institutions, which were providing courses of debatable quality, mostly in business and management, mostly in London. Far from driving up quality, student choice seemed to be driving it down. But these problems paled into insignificance as the economy continued on its path of sluggish low growth. To make things worse, government had to abandon a “fiscal illusion” in government accounting, as the Office for National Statistics forced a justified change which put more costs onto current balance sheets rather than allowing them to be deferred for many years. For a while, the fact that interest rates were near zero concealed the punitive possibilities of debt levels and loan repayments, but then government – facing budgetary pressure – decided to freeze thresholds and change repayment terms. (Jim Dickinson’s Wonkhe blog on 2 February 2026 was a detailed explanation of how we got to where we are). Interest rates rose to 3-4% but government persisted with the use of RPI + 3% as the loan interest rate, even though for almost every other purpose it used the lower figure of CPI (consumer prices index). The current outcry on loans became inevitable; indeed, it had even been predicted by Nick Hillman, one of the architects of the loan system, who wrote in a 2014 Guardian article: “… come with me to the election of 2030. Those who began university when fees went up to £9,000 in 2012 will be in their mid-thirties by then. That is the average age of a first-time homebuyer and the typical age for female graduates to have their first child. By then, there will be millions of voters who owe large sums to the Student Loans Company but who need money for nappies and toys, not to mention childcare and mortgages. So, however reasonable student loans look on paper now, the graduates of tomorrow could end up a powerful electoral force.”

Meanwhile, some of the graduates of yesterday were quick to ride the coat-tails of the loans debate and cry “more means worse”, even as all the more successful world economies continue in the opposite direction. Often mentioned but never identified, ‘Mickey Mouse courses’ also took a supposed share of the blame, despite expert commentators like David Kernohan of Wonkhe pointing out the extreme difficulty of identifying them in ways that government or the regulator could operationalise. The Labour government adjusted its stance on exactly what the country needs with some vaguely quantified assertions about skills in its White Paper, and former Skills Minister Robert Halfon popped up on Times Radio on 14 February 2026 to argue, as he always did, for more apprenticeships. Acknowledging employers’ decades-long unwillingness to pay for training, he suggested they should be ‘incentivised’ with £1billion of public money. But even with public funding for employers’ costs, vocational training apprenticeships will mostly remain a great idea ‘for other people’s children’, as Alison Wolf once witheringly put it. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch got the kind of publicity she probably hoped for as she proposed in an ITV interview to help Plan 2 graduates by reducing interest rates, even as personal finance guru Martin Lewis pointed out this would only help the richest graduates, and the way to help people was by unfreezing the salary thresholds at which the higher repayments kicked in. He apologised for gatecrashing the interview, but he was quite right, and understandably frustrated. Badenoch said this could be afforded by removing 100,000 students on ‘low quality’ courses and using the consequent savings. Shadow Education Secretary Laura Trott, under pressure from the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, waxed lyrical about LEO data on graduate salaries and suggested that Creative Arts courses were low quality and should feature in the 100,000 reduction. She refused to say that university closures could be ruled out, but there was, of course, no coherent plan for the supposed reductions and their effects on local economies, especially in regions where salaries are lower.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch was unabashed and led with the topic at PMQs on 25 February 2026 and Jim Dickinson blogged the same day for Wonkhe, pointing out the problems with most of the interventions from backbenchers of all parties, and noting that things will soon get worse with barely-noticed measures affecting postgraduate student support in the previous budget. Prime Minister Keir Starmer committed to a review of the loans problem, but in Times Higher Education on 27 February 2026 Helen Packer had experts queueing up to point out that: “Quick tweaks to the terms of English student loans are unlikely to satisfy disgruntled graduates and may conflict with wider plans to reform post-16 education.”

The major problems with HE finance have still not yet had equivalent mainstream recognition. In recent years the tuition fee income of universities fell from £12billion to £10billion simply through inflation and the freezing of tuition fees. 40 % of universities are reporting deficits and the majority are making staff redundant. Government has unfrozen tuition fees but then hit universities with a levy on international student fees which more than wiped out the extra income from fee increases. Visa restrictions have also hit international student enrolment and severely reduced some universities’ opportunity to compensate for the losses on home students. In 2011 Universities UK hoped that accepting the £9000 fee would rescue the HE sector from the coming austerity, but the rescue was short-lived, as fees failed to rise with inflation. Now another government faces the challenge of finding a long-term sustainable solution to the problem of funding higher education. It seems far from the top of the agenda for the embattled Starmer administration, but the media outrage over student loans might push it higher.

Successive cohorts of students have experienced various Plans for repayment. The main problem is Plan 2, affecting students who started their courses from 2012-2013 to 2022-2023. The numbers rapidly become hugely confusing, and some commentators fail to recognise even such basic issues as the need to ensure that all costs and prices are on the same base. But almost all agree that Plan 2 is unfair and should be changed.

American students have more orthodox commercial loans to pay for their tuition and in the USA the growing scale of student debt also became a major political problem. However Americans are much more accustomed to the high costs of HE: the culture encourages parents to save from birth to pay for tuition, and the taxation system rewards both savings and loan repayments. In addition, a ‘borrower defense’ program, created in 1994, allows students to get loans cancelled if they are misled by their colleges about their future employment prospects. The Obama administration began to penalise institutions, mostly for-profit institutions, which did not adequately prepare students for gainful employment which would enable them to repay their loans. Student debt rose to about $1.6trillion; by January 2025 President Biden had forgiven $183.6billion of debt, before President Trump set out to turn the clock back. In the USA the ‘graduate premium’, the advantage for graduates who earn on average higher pay than non-graduates, has continued to rise despite continuing HE expansion, whereas in the UK, almost uniquely, the premium has declined. This suggests, as Jim Dickinson has argued on Wonkhe, that the problem is one of supply rather than demand – employers will not or cannot pay more in the sluggish UK economy. Graeme Atherton (West London) pointed out in Times Higher Education on 26 February 2026 that despite Trump’s changes the US system is still more progressive than Plan 2. John Burn-Murdoch had a telling chart in his Financial Times article on 16 February 2026, ‘Is higher education still worth it is the wrong question’, showing that in the UK the graduate premium had decreased from 1997-2022 as HE numbers increased, contrary to the trends in the USA, Canada, Netherlands, France and Spain.

The problem of financing UK HE remains unsolved and the clamour of vested interests has become almost deafening. The main architect of the fees regime, David Willetts, who wrote a book about intergenerational unfairness, tried hard on Conservative Home to blame someone else while defending progressive expansion rather than reduction in HE student numbers. Alternative solutions abound, but have not yet penetrated the mainstream media debate about HE policy. Nick Barr (LSE), a longstanding expert commentator on HE finance, wrote in July 2023 about ‘A fairer way to finance tertiary education’.  There was detailed and expert analysis in Financial modelling by London Economics in March 2024. In September 2024 Tim Leunig, a former Chief Analyst at the Department for Education wrote a HEPI blog on ‘Undergraduate fees revisited’ alongside his HEPI debate paper, which promised that “Highest earners would pay the most, as is appropriate in a social insurance scheme”. The Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) in April 2025 published a report asking ‘How should undergraduate degrees be funded? A collection of essays’. Mike Larkin (emeritus, Queen’s University Belfast) posted on his Total Equality for Students blog on 13 January 2025 a detailed and plausible set of proposals for reform of the present system, summarising many of the attempts to initiate debate.

Yet it is only now that the financing of HE might creep into the mainstream debate, entering through the back door of unfair student loan repayments and threatening to deliver results that may help some graduates but damage higher education even more. Nick Hillman has argued persuasively that of the three main proposed solutions to the student loans furore, one is unwise, one unaffordable, one unpalatable, and all are unfair. Nevertheless, something must be done. Former Director of Fair Access John Blake, interviewed by Nicola Woolcock in The Times on 4 February 2026, said;“…  a system that feels so suffocating to so many is fundamentally broken, no matter how many graphs about average graduate salaries we make…. I think we may need to move to a formal graduate tax. There are no popular options here, it’s not just people saying I’m in debt and it’s going up every year. Even if the system computes, it has a sense of being ridiculous when you’re in it. This system has run out of road.” Blake is Director of the new think tank The Post-18 Project. ‘The walls are closing in on our doomed student loans system’, as Jim Dickinson wrote for Wonkhe on 11 February 2026.

When it started, the student loan system was perhaps financially logical, if you accepted its progressive premise of redistribution. Repeated government tinkering in the face of extreme budgetary pressure, especially the freezing of thresholds, made it successively more and more unfair, and has now exposed the underlying psychological and emotional illogicality. The oppressive psychological impact of the loan system on graduates facing a difficult job market makes it unsustainable. So what is to be done?

If  higher education is free, poor people who don’t go to university pay for the education of rich people who do. If students pay all the cost of their higher education, as is now being widely proposed, then everyone suffers because economic growth and incentives are diminished. We need to find a halfway house which shares the cost of higher education between graduates and the wider society which benefits from HE. The immediate challenge is to find a sustainable way to preserve the progressive and redistributive nature of student finance, which is not experienced by successive cohorts of graduates as oppressive and demotivating.

The Labour government has accepted the need for a comprehensive review of how HE should be financed, but it remains a work in progress, promised but not near the top of the agenda. Short-term budget fixes like the international students’ fees levy suggest that there is limited sympathy in government for the financial plight of many universities. Previous governments of various stripes have resorted to bipartisan national inquiries (Dearing, Browne) which straddle general elections to reduce their electoral risk, and such a device cannot be ruled out this time. The danger is that, under the short-term pressure of finding a fix for the student loans problem, government will lurch into a ‘solution’ with possibly massive collateral damage to the whole HE sector, and to local economies. Government is desperate not to increase its spending and borrowing any further, and in any case has other higher priorities than HE. But a solution to student loan repayments which requires HE to contain the cost of improving the system may force the closure of a significant number of universities, with long-term and possibly irreparable damage to their local communities and economies – probably mostly in the Midlands and the North, not London and the South East. Brian Bell (King’s College London) has just been appointed principal adviser to both the PM and the Chancellor on macroeconomics and fiscal policy. He spoke at an LSE event in February about migration, where he said, discouragingly: “I’m sure we’d all like for there to be a complete rethinking of university financing, and perhaps even the university model across the UK – perhaps we shouldn’t all be teaching three-year degrees in X and Y – perhaps we should have different universities doing different things. But I see no realistic prospect of that happening.” These are hard questions with no easy answers, but too many people are getting too many things wrong about both the costs and the benefits of higher education. Let us at least start by understanding what the problem is.

Rob Cuthbert is editor of SRHE News and the SRHE Blog, Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics. Email rob.cuthbert@uwe.ac.uk. Twitter/X @RobCuthbert. Bluesky @robcuthbert22.bsky.social.


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One Nation, One Subscription: why it matters for India’s researchers

by Satveer Singh Nehra, Saloni Chaudhary, and Kanchan Nagpal

India’s One Nation, One Subscription (ONOS) scheme is one of the most ambitious initiatives in reshaping global access to scholarly knowledge. Approved as a central scheme in November 2024 and rolled out from January 2025, ONOS promises nationwide access to around 13,000 international journals from 30 major publishers for publicly funded higher education and research institutions. Our study aimed to critically examine the potential of this new scheme in transforming India’s research landscape, alongside the challenges involved in its implementation and the opportunities for global accessibility that lie ahead. This blog post abridges the key findings of our study, published in Policy Reviews in Higher Education and highlights how ONOS can foster inclusive growth and research activities.

While India is among the largest producers of scientific and engineering papers globally, its academic institutions have historically faced significant barriers to accessing high-impact international journals due to restrictive paywalls and exorbitant subscription costs. While premier institutions such as the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) possess the financial capacity to procure these expensive databases, a vast majority of universities and colleges struggle to provide even rudimentary access to cutting-edge research. This groundbreaking policy seeks to bridge the urban-rural knowledge divide, reduce institutional costs, and position India as a global research leader by integrating paywalled content into the country’s academic mainstream.

The ONOS initiative is a central scheme formally approved by the Union Cabinet on November 25, 2024. It is administered under the supervision of the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India (PIB, 2025). Implementation of the first phase commenced on 1 January 2025. The scheme is executed by the Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET), an Inter-University Centre of the University Grants Commission (UGC), which manages the subscriptions via a centralised portal.

The financial commitment to this initiative is substantial, with an allocation of approximately ₹6,000 crore ($715 million) for the calendar years 2025, 2026, and 2027. Additionally, the policy includes a central fund of ₹150 crore ($16.9 million) per annum to support authors in paying Article Processing Charges (APCs) for publishing in selected high-quality Open Access journals, thereby aiding researchers who previously had to pay these high costs themselves.

The scale of ONOS is vast, comprising agreements with 30 leading international publishers, including major entities such as Wiley, Springer Nature, Elsevier ScienceDirect, IEEE, and the American Chemical Society. Through these agreements, approximately 13,000 e-journals across 27 subject categories, ranging from STEM to humanities and social sciences, are made available to institutions. Currently, the initiative encompasses over 6,500 research and development institutes, as well as central and state government universities and colleges. The access mechanism utilises the ONOS portal, where users can access resources on campus via institutional IPs or off campus using the Indian Access Management Federation (INFED) for authentication.

ONOS as a catalyst for NEP 2020

The ONOS initiative is not an isolated measure but a strategic enabler of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which envisions transforming India into a global knowledge superpower. The NEP 2020 prioritises universal access to quality education and the fostering of a vibrant research ecosystem (Ullah, 2024). By centralising subscriptions and removing paywalls, ONOS directly supports the NEP’s equity mandate, ensuring that students in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities have access to the same prestigious scholarly journals as those in elite institutions.

Furthermore, the NEP emphasises multidisciplinary learning, encouraging students to break existing boundaries between disciplines (Kasturirangan, 2019). ONOS supports this pedagogical shift by providing access to a diverse array of multidisciplinary resources, allowing, for instance, engineering students to access social science literature. This aligns with the establishment of the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF), which aims to foster an innovative culture across Indian universities and research laboratories through financial assistance. The primary impact of ONOS is the democratisation of information, potentially benefiting nearly 1.8 crore (18 million) students, faculty, and researchers. By negotiating collective licenses, the government aims to resolve accessibility issues while ensuring compliance with copyright laws (Nithila Kovai, 2025).

Prior to ONOS, the country’s collective expenditure on academic journals was estimated at over ₹1,500 crore annually. Through bulk licensing, ONOS aims to reduce these national expenditures on journal access by 30–40% (Chakraborty et al, 2020). By ensuring immediate dissemination of global research to the wider community, the initiative is expected to boost India’s research productivity and citation rates, thereby enhancing the nation’s visibility in the global academic discourse.

Consequently, ONOS is viewed as a well-thought-out investment in India’s research capacities, designed to create a level playing field for innovation nationwide through enhanced digital infrastructure.

Possible roadblocks

Despite its transformative potential, the ONOS initiative faces significant challenges in implementation. A primary concern is the “digital divide” and infrastructure gaps. Over 70% of rural Indian colleges lack reliable internet access, which severely limits the reach of this digital-first scheme. Without robust digital infrastructure and literacy training, the benefits of ONOS may remain concentrated in urban centres, undermining its goal of inclusivity.

Financial sustainability is another critical issue. Unlike global open-access initiatives such as the EU’s “Plan S“, which mandate freely available research, ONOS relies on a recurring subscription model. Critics argue that this perpetuates dependency on commercial publishers and may strain public finances during economic downturns. There is also concern regarding the dominance of Western publishers, whose profit margins can reach 35–40% (Fazackerley, 2023), potentially reinforcing a system where public funds subsidise corporate profits (Olsson et al, 2020). Furthermore, the current focus is predominantly on STEM disciplines, with insufficient coverage for social sciences, humanities, and regional language scholarship.

Institutional eligibility also remains a point of contention. There is ambiguity regarding the inclusion of private higher education institutions, which enrol over half of India’s students. Excluding these institutions would significantly diminish the scheme’s impact and reinforce inequities in scholarly access.

Concluding Remarks

India’s One Nation One Subscription initiative represents a bold paradigm shift in research policy, moving from fragmented, institution-based access to a unified national entitlement. By guaranteeing access to over 13,000 global journals for millions of users, it promises to catalyse a transformation in the country’s research ecosystem and support the ambitious goals of NEP 2020. However, for ONOS to truly democratise knowledge, it must navigate the challenges of digital infrastructure in rural areas, ensure sustainable funding, and eventually evolve towards a hybrid model that strengthens India’s domestic open-access publishing capabilities alongside these international subscriptions. Success will depend on overcoming publisher resistance, ensuring inclusive coverage across all disciplines and institutional types, and integrating this access with robust support for the dissemination of indigenous research.

Satveer Singh Nehra is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Library and Information Science, Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune. His doctoral research focuses on Open Research Data and Research Data Management, emphasising the need for a national policy framework to strengthen open science initiatives in India. In addition to his primary research area, he actively explores emerging fields such as Digital Humanities and the application of Artificial Intelligence in library environments.

Dr Saloni Chaudhary is an academic and researcher dedicated to the evolving landscape of Library and Information Science. She currently serves as an Assistant Librarian at the University of Delhi and holds a PhD in Library and Information Science from Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi. Her research interests lie at the intersection of Scientometrics, Digital Literacy, and Digital Humanities, where she explores the impact of digital advancements on knowledge systems.

Dr Kanchan Nagpal is a library and information science professional and works as an Assistant Librarian at the India International Centre.  She holds a PhD degree in Library and Information Science. She is a council member of the Indian Library Association. 


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Consumer rights and complaints in English higher education: a new form of student agency?

by Rille Raaper

A year ago I wrote a blog post inviting the SRHE community to reflect on what it means to be political for today’s students. That piece was a thought experiment exploring political agency beyond traditional notions of student activism or protest. I now want to extend this thinking by considering whether student-as-consumer complaints can also be understood as a form of political agency.

Consumerism has increasingly invaded new sectors of society, including higher education. In the UK, consumer rights and relationships are actively promoted through higher education policy, which frames students as consumers and universities as providers. The Office for Students, the main regulator in England, encourages students to understand their consumer rights with statements such as: ‘Knowing your consumer rights should help you to be protected if things go wrong on your course’. Although the phrase “things going wrong” remains ambiguous, universities must comply with consumer protection law by providing accurate, up-to-date information about their offerings and maintaining internal complaints and appeals processes for students who wish to raise concerns about their experience. These processes are broadly similar across institutions, typically moving from informal resolution to formal complaints, and, if unresolved, escalation to the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA) – the body responsible for reviewing unsettled student complaints in England and Wales.

While it may be a ‘chicken and egg’ question as to whether the rise in complaints or the introduction of formal procedures came first, what is clear is that student complaints have grown significantly. Although university-level complaint data is confidential, we know that the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA) received 3,613 complaints in 2024 – an increase of over 130% compared to 2016. The financial implications are notable: £677,785 was awarded to students following a “Justified” decision, and an additional £1,809,805 was offered as part of settlements in 2024. It is reasonable to assume that university-managed complaints have experienced a similar surge.

This peak in complaints and related institutional procedures raises an important question: should we view complaints not merely as an inconvenience or evidence of institutional shortcomings, but as a process that activates certain forms of agency within the student experience? Specifically, could this agency represent a new form of political agency in a context where students may be reluctant to engage in traditional activism for fear of jeopardising their academic success and financial investment?

In my broader work, I adopt a wide lens on political agency, drawing on works from Michel Foucault, Sara Ahmed, and Jouni Häkli & Kirsi Pauliina Kallio. From this perspective, political agency encompasses ‘a variety of individual and collective, official and mundane, rational and affective, and human and non-human ways of acting, affecting and impacting politically’. Complaints, while largely individual, can be both rational and affective, making them a compelling example for expanding our understanding of political agency. When considering complaints as political agency, I propose we start by reflecting on the following:

Institutional inequalities

Most student complaints originate – at least from the perspective of those making them – in response to perceived institutional failure or wrongdoing. Complaints are therefore generally directed against some form of injustice. While students can raise concerns about a wide range of issues, the OIA statistics indicate that service-related complaints, eg poor teaching quality, undelivered services, or misleading marketing, account for roughly one third of all cases handled by the OIA.

Courage

Like any form of political action, making a complaint requires considerable courage and perseverance. Sara Ahmed’s work highlights how raising a complaint can make the complainant vulnerable, positioning them as the locus of an institutional problem. Similar ideas resonate with Foucault’s notion of parrhesia – truth-telling as a courageous act that is both risky and potentially transformative for the individual.

Social spillovers

Although a student complaint is typically an individual act, it carries an element of publicness. Complaints can create opportunities for students to engage with their broader social context and advocate for fairness in higher education. This ethical stance may ripple outward, influencing others and contributing to wider institutional change; for example, when a single complaint leads to policy or practice reforms.

While we may debate whether student complaints are a ‘necessary evil’ in market-driven higher education, I invite readers to consider whether raising a complaint might also be a courageous and transformative experience for our students. If we allow ourselves to think this way, complaints could become an important lens for understanding how today’s students exercise their political agency.

For more details, please see my book published as part of the SRHE and Routledge book series Research into Higher Education:

Raaper, R (2024). Student Identity and Political Agency. Activism, Representation and Consumer Rights Oxon: Routledge

Professor Rille Raaper is in the School of Education at Durham University. Rille’s research interests lie in the sociology of higher education with a particular focus on student identity, experience and political agency in a variety of higher education settings. Her research is primarily concerned with how universities organise their work in competitive higher education markets, and the implications market forces have on current and future students. The two particular strands of Rille’s research relate to: a) student identity and experience in consumerist higher education; b) student agency, citizenship and political activism. rille.raaper@durham.ac.uk


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Teaching students to use AI: from digital competence to a learning outcome

by Concepción González García and Nina Pallarés Cerdà

Debates about generative AI in higher education often start from the same assumption: students need a certain level of digital competence before they can use AI productively. Those who already know how to search, filter and evaluate online information are seen as the ones most likely to benefit from tools such as ChatGPT, while others risk being left further behind.

Recent studies reinforce this view. Students with stronger digital skills in areas like problem‑solving and digital ethics tend to use generative AI more frequently (Caner‑Yıldırım, 2025). In parallel, work using frameworks such as DigComp has mostly focused on measuring gaps in students’ digital skills – often showing that perceived “digital natives” are less uniformly proficient than we might think (Lucas et al, 2022). What we know much less about is the reverse relationship: can carefully designed uses of AI actually develop students’ digital competences – and for whom?

In a recent article, we addressed this question empirically by analysing the impact of a generative AI intervention on university students’ digital competences (García & Pallarés, 2026). Students’ skills were assessed using the European DigComp 2.2 framework (Vuorikari et al, 2022).

Moving beyond static measures of digital competence

Research on students’ digital competences in higher education has expanded rapidly over the past decade. Yet much of this work still treats digital competence as a stable attribute that students bring with them into university, rather than as a dynamic and educable capability that can be shaped through instructional design. The consequence is a field dominated by one-off assessments, surveys and diagnostic tools that map students’ existing skills but tell us little about how those skills develop.

This predominant focus on measurement rather than development has produced a conceptual blind spot: we know far more about how digital competences predict students’ use of emerging technologies than about how educational uses of these technologies might enhance those competences in the first place.

Recent studies reinforce this asymmetry. Students with higher levels of digital competence are more likely to engage with generative AI tools and to display positive attitudes towards their use (Moravec et al, 2024; Saklaki & Gardikiotis, 2024). In this ‘competence-first’ model, digital competence appears as a precondition for productive engagement with AI. Yet this framing obscures a crucial pedagogical question: might AI, when intentionally embedded in learning activities, actually support the growth of the very competences it is presumed to require?

A second limitation compounds this problem: the absence of a standardised framework for analysing and comparing the effects of AI-based interventions on digital competence development. Although DigComp is widely used for diagnostic purposes, few studies employ it systematically to evaluate learning gains or to map changes across specific competence areas. As a result, evidence from different interventions remains fragmented, making it difficult to identify which aspects of digital competence are most responsive to AI-mediated learning.

There is, nevertheless, emerging evidence that AI can do more than simply ‘consume’ digital competence. Studies by Dalgıç et al (2024) and Naamati-Schneider & Alt (2024) suggest that integrating tools such as ChatGPT into structured learning tasks can stimulate information search, analytical reasoning and critical evaluation—provided that students are guided to question and verify AI outputs rather than accept them uncritically. Yet these contributions remain exploratory. We still lack experimental or quasi-experimental evidence that links AI-based instructional designs to measurable improvements in specific DigComp areas, and we know little about whether such benefits accrue equally to all students or disproportionately to those who already possess stronger digital skills.

This gap matters. If digital competences are conceived as malleable rather than fixed, then AI is not merely a technology that demands certain skills but a pedagogical tool through which those skills can be cultivated. This reframing shifts the centre of the debate: away from asking whether students are ready for AI, and towards asking whether our teaching practices are ready to use AI in ways that promote competence development and reduce inequalities in learning.

Our study: teaching students to work with AI, not around it

We designed a randomised controlled trial with 169 undergraduate students enrolled in a Microeconomics course. Students were allocated by class group to either a treatment or a control condition. All students followed the same curriculum and completed the same online quizzes through the institutional virtual campus.

The crucial difference lay in how generative AI was integrated:

  • In the treatment condition, students received an initial workshop on using large language models strategically. They practised:
  • contextualising questions
  • breaking problems into steps
  • iteratively refining prompts
  • and checking their own solutions before turning to the AI.
  • Throughout the course, their online self-assessments included adaptive feedback: instead of simply marking answers as right or wrong, the system offered hints, step-by-step prompts and suggestions on how to use AI tools as a thinking partner.
  • In the control condition, students completed the same quizzes with standard right/wrong feedback, and no training or guidance on AI.

Importantly, the intervention did not encourage students to outsource solutions to AI. Rather, it framed AI as an interactive study partner to support self-explanation, comparison of strategies and self-regulation in problem solving.

We administered pre- and post-course questionnaires aligned with DigComp 2.2, focusing on five competences: information and data literacy, communication and collaboration, safety, and two aspects of problem solving (functional use of digital tools and metacognitive self-regulation). Using a difference-in-differences model with individual fixed effects, we estimated how the probability of reporting the highest level of each competence changed over time for the treatment group relative to the control group.

What changed when AI was taught and used in this way?

At the overall sample level, we found statistically significant improvements in three areas:

  • Information and data literacy – students in the AI-training condition were around 15 percentage points more likely to report the highest level of competence in identifying information needs and carrying out effective digital searches.
  • Problem solving – functional dimension – the probability of reporting the top level in using digital tools (including AI) to solve tasks increased by about 24 percentage points.
  • Problem solving – metacognitive dimension – a similar 24-point gain emerged for recognising what aspects of one’s digital competences need to be updated or improved.

In other words, the AI-integrated teaching design was associated not only with better use of digital tools, but also with stronger awareness of digital strengths and weaknesses – a key ingredient of autonomous learning. Communication and safety competences also showed positive but smaller and more uncertain effects. Here, the pattern becomes clearer when we look at who benefited most.

A compensatory effect: AI as a potential leveller, not just an amplifier

When we distinguished students by their initial level of digital competence, a pattern emerged. For those starting below the median, the intervention produced large and significant gains in all five competences, with improvements between 18 and 38 percentage points depending on the area. For students starting above the median, effects were smaller and, in some cases, non-significant.

This suggests a compensatory effect: students who began the course with weaker digital competences benefited the most from the AI-based teaching design. Rather than widening the digital gap, guided use of AI acted as a levelling mechanism, bringing lower-competence students closer to their more digitally confident peers.

Conceptually, this challenges an implicit assumption in much of the literature – namely, that generative AI will primarily enhance the learning of already advantaged students, because they are the ones with the skills and confidence to exploit it. Our findings show that, when AI is embedded within intentional pedagogy, explicit training and structured feedback, the opposite can happen: those who started with fewer resources can gain the most.

From ‘allow or ban’ to ‘how do we teach with AI?’

For higher education policy and practice, the implications are twofold.

First, we need to stop thinking of digital competence purely as a prerequisite for using AI. Under the right design conditions, AI can be a pedagogical resource to build those competences, especially in information literacy, problem solving and metacognitive self-regulation. That means integrating AI into curricula not as an add-on, but as part of how we teach students to plan, monitor and evaluate their learning.

Second, our results suggest that universities concerned with equity and digital inclusion should focus less on whether students have access to AI tools (many already do) and more on who receives support to learn how to use them well. Providing structured opportunities to practise prompting, to critique AI outputs and to reflect on one’s own digital skills may be particularly valuable for students who enter university with lower levels of digital confidence.

This does not resolve all the ethical and practical concerns around generative AI – far from it. But it shifts the conversation. Instead of treating AI as an external threat to academic integrity that must be tightly controlled, we can start to ask:

  • How can we design tasks where the added value lies in asking good questions, justifying decisions and evaluating evidence, rather than in producing a single ‘correct’ answer?
  • How can we support students to see AI not as a shortcut to avoid thinking, but as a tool to think better and know themselves better as learners?
  • Under what conditions does AI genuinely help to close digital competence gaps, and when might it risk opening new ones?

Answering these questions will require further longitudinal and multi-institutional research, including replication studies and objective performance measures alongside self-reports. Yet the evidence we present offers a cautiously optimistic message: teaching students how to use AI can be part of a strategy to strengthen digital competences and reduce inequalities in higher education, rather than merely another driver of stratification.

Concepción González García is Assistant Professor of Economics at the Faculty of Economics and Business, Catholic University of Murcia (UCAM), Spain, and holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Alicante. Her research interests include macroeconomics, particularly fiscal policy, and education.

Nina Pallarés is Assistant Professor of Economics and Academic Coordinator of the Master’s in Management of Sports Entities at the Faculty of Economics and Business, Catholic University of Murcia (UCAM), Spain. Her research focuses on applied econometrics, with particular emphasis on health, labour, education, and family economics.


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Walk on by: the dilemma of the blind eye

by Dennis Sherwood

Forty years on…

I don’t remember much about my experiences at work some forty-odd years ago, but one event I recall vividly is the discussion provoked by a case study at a training event. The case was simple, just a few lines:

Sam was working late one evening, and happened to walk past Pat’s office. The door was closed, but Sam could hear Pat being very abusive to Alex. Some ten minutes later, Sam saw Alex sobbing.

What might Sam do?

What should Sam do?

Quite a few in the group said “nothing”, on the grounds that whatever was going on was none of Sam’s business. Maybe Pat had good grounds to be angry with Alex and if the local culture was, let’s say, harsh, what’s the problem? Nor was there any evidence that Alex’s sobbing was connected with Pat – perhaps something else had happened in the intervening time.

Others thought that the least could Sam do was to ask if Alex was OK, and offer some comfort – a suggestion countered by the “it’s a tough world” brigade.

The central theme of the conversation was then all about culture. Suppose the culture was supportive and caring. Pat’s behaviour would be out of order, even if Pat was angry, and even if Alex had done something Pat had regarded as wrong.

So what might – and indeed should – Sam do?

Should Sam should confront Pat? Or inform Pat’s boss?

What if Sam is Pat’s boss? In that case then, yes, Sam should confront Pat: failure to do so would condone bad behaviour, which in this culture, would be a ‘bad thing’.

But if Sam is not Pat’s boss, things are much more tricky. If Sam is subordinate to Pat, confrontation is hardly possible. And informing Pat’s boss could be interpreted as snitching or trouble-making. Another possibility is that Sam and Pat are peers, giving Sam ‘the right’ to confront Pat – but only if peer-to-peer honesty and mutual pressure is ‘allowed’. Which it might not be, for many, even benign, cultures are in reality networks of mutual ‘non-aggression treaties’, in which ‘peers’ are monarchs in their own realms – so Sam might deliberately choose to turn a blind eye to whatever Pat might be doing, for fear of setting a precedent that would allow Pat, or indeed Ali or Chris, to poke their noses into Sam’s own domain.

And if Sam is in a different part of the organisation – or indeed from another organisation altogether – then maybe Sam’s safest action is back where we started. To do nothing. To walk on by.

Sam is a witness to Pat’s bad behaviour. Does the choice to ‘walk on by’ make Sam complicit too, albeit at arm’s length?

I’ve always thought that this case study, and its implications, are powerful – which is probably why I’ve remembered it over so long a time.

The truth about GCSE, AS and A level grades in England

I mention it here because it is relevant to the main theme of this blog – a theme that, if you read it, makes you a witness too. Not, of course, to ‘Pat’s’ bad behaviour, but to another circumstance which, in my opinion, is a great injustice doing harm to many people – an injustice that ‘Pat’ has got away with for many years now, not only because ‘Pat’s peers’ have turned a blind eye – and a deaf ear too – but also because all others who have known about it have chosen to ‘walk on by’.

The injustice of which I speak is the fact that about one GCSE, AS and A level grade in every four, as awarded in England, is wrong, and has been wrong for years. Not only that: in addition, the rules for appeals do not allow these wrong grades to be discovered and corrected. So the wrong grades last for ever, as does the damage they do.

To make that real, in August 2025, some 6.5 million grades were awarded, of which around 1.6 million were wrong, with no appeal. That’s an average of about one wrong grade ‘awarded’ to every candidate in the land.

Perhaps you already knew all that. But if you didn’t, you do now. As a consequence, like Sam in that case study, you are a witness to wrong-doing.

It’s important, of course, that you trust the evidence. The prime source is Ofqual’s November 2018 report, Marking Consistency Metrics – An update, which presents the results of an extensive research project in which very large numbers of GCSE, AS and A level scripts were in essence marked twice – once by an ‘assistant’ examiner (as happens in ‘ordinary’ marking each year), and again by a subject senior examiner, whose academic judgement is the ultimate authority, and whose mark, and hence grade, is deemed ‘definitive’, the arbiter of ‘right’.

Each script therefore had two marks and two grades, enabling those grades to be compared. If they were the same, then the ‘assistant’ examiner’s grade – the grade that is on the candidate’s certificate – corresponds to the senior examiner’s ‘definitive’ grade, and is therefore ‘right’; if the two grades are different, then the assistant examiner’s grade is necessarily ‘non-definitive’, or, in plain English, wrong.

You might have thought that the number of ‘non-definitive’/wrong grades would be small and randomly distributed across subjects. In fact, the key results are shown on page 21 of Ofqual’s report as Figure 12, reproduced here:

Figure 1: Reproduction of Ofqual’s evidence concerning the reliability of school exam grades

To interpret this chart, I refer to this extract from the report’s Executive Summary:

The probability of receiving the ‘definitive’ qualification grade varies by qualification and subject, from 0.96 (a mathematics qualification) to 0.52 (an English language and literature qualification).

This states that 96% of Maths grades (all varieties, at all levels), as awarded, are ‘definitive’/right, as are 52% of those for Combined English Language and Literature (a subject available only at A level). Accordingly, by implication, 4% of Maths grades, and 48% of English Language and Literature grades, are ‘non-definitive’/wrong. Maths grades, as awarded, can therefore be regarded as 96% reliable; English Language and Literature grades as 52% reliable.

Scrutiny of the chart will show that the heavy black line in the upper blue box for Maths maps onto about 0.96 on the horizontal axis; the equivalent line for English Language and Literature maps onto 0.56. The measures of the reliability of the grades for each of the other subjects are designated similarly. Ofqual’s report does not give any further numbers, but Table 1 shows my estimates from Ofqual’s Figure 12:

 Probability of
 ‘Definitive’ grade‘Non-definitive’ grade
Maths (all varieties)96%4%
Chemistry92%8%
Physics88%12%
Biology85%15%
Psychology78%22%
Economics74%26%
Religious Studies66%34%
Business Studies66%34%
Geography65%35%
Sociology63%37%
English Language61%39%
English Literature58%42%
History56%44%
Combined English Language and Literature (A level only)52%48%

Table 1: My estimates of the reliability of school exam grades, as inferred from measurements of Ofqual’s Figure 12.

Ofqual’s report does not present any corresponding information for each of GCSE, AS or A level separately, nor any analysis by exam board. Also absent is a measure of the all-subject overall average. Given, however, the maximum value of 96%, and the minimum of 52%, the average is likely to be somewhere in the middle, say, in the seventies; in fact, if each subject is weighted by its cohort, the resulting average over the 14 subjects shown is about 74%. Furthermore, if other subjects – such as French, Spanish, Computing, Art… – are taken into consideration, the overall average is most unlikely to be greater than 82% or less than 66%, suggesting that an overall average reliability of 75% for all subjects is a reasonable estimate.

That’s the evidence that, across all subjects and levels, about 75% of grades, as awarded, are ‘definitive’/right and 25% – one in four – are ‘non-definitive’/wrong – evidence that has been in the public domain since 2018. But evidence that has been much disputed by those with vested interests.

Ofqual’s results are readily explained. We all know that different examiners can, legitimately, give the same answer (slightly) different marks. As a result, the script’s total mark might lie on different sides of a grade boundary, depending on who did the marking. Only one grade, however, is ‘definitive’.

Importantly, there are no errors in the marking studied by Ofqual – in fact, Ofqual’s report mentions ‘marking error’ just once, and then in a rather different context. All the grading discrepancies measured in Ofqual’s research are therefore attributable solely to legitimate differences in academic opinion. And since the range of legitimate marks is far narrower in subjects such as Maths and Physics, as compared to English Literature and History, then the probability that an ‘assistant’ examiner’s legitimate mark might result in a ‘non-definitive’ grade will be much higher for, say, History as compared to Physics. Hence the sequence of subjects in Ofqual’s Figure 12.

As regards appeals, in 2016, Ofqual – in full knowledge of the results of this research (see paragraph 28 of this Ofqual Board Paper, dated 18 November 2015) – changed the rules, requiring that a grade can be changed only if a ‘review of marking’ discovers a ‘marking error’. To quote an Ofqual ‘news item’ of 26 May 2016:

Exam boards must tell examiners who review results that they should not change marks unless there is a clear marking error. …It is not fair to allow some students to have a second bite of the cherry by giving them a higher mark on review, when the first mark was perfectly appropriate. This undermines the hard work and professionalism of markers, most of whom are teachers themselves. These changes will mean a level-playing field for all students and help to improve public confidence in the marking system.

This assumes that the legitimate marks given by different examiners are all equally “appropriate”, and identical in every way.

This assumption. however, is false: if one of those marks corresponds to the ‘definitive’ grade, and another to a ‘non-definitive’ grade, they are not identical at all. Furthermore, as already mentioned, there is hardly any mention of marking errors in Ofqual’s November 2018 report. All the grade discrepancies they identified can therefore only be attributable to legitimate differences in academic opinion, and so cannot be discovered and corrected by the rules that have been in place since 2016.

Over to you…

So, back to that case study.

Having read this far, like Sam, you have knowledge of wrong-doing – not Pat tearing a strip off Alex, but Ofqual awarding some 1.5 million wrong grades every year. All with no right of appeal.

What are you going to do?

You’re probably thinking something like, “Nothing”, “It’s not my job”, “It’s not my problem”, “I’m in no position to do anything, even if I wanted to”.

All of which I understand. No, it’s certainly not your job. And it’s not your problem directly, in that it’s not you being awarded the wrong grade. But it might be your problem indirectly – if you are involved with admissions, and if grades play a material role, you may be accepting a student who is not fully qualified (in that the grade on the certificate might be too high), or – perhaps worse – rejecting a student who is (in that the grade on the certificate is too low). Just to make that last point real, about one candidate in every six with a certificate showing AAA for A level Physics, Chemistry and Biology in fact truly merited at least one B. If such a candidate took a place at Med School, for example, not only is that candidate under-qualified, but a place has also been denied to a candidate with a certificate showing AAB but who merited AAA.

And although you, as an individual, are indeed not is a position to do anything about it, you, collectively, surely are.

HE is, by far, the largest and most important user of A levels. And relying on a ‘product’ that is only about 75% reliable. HE, collectively, could put significant pressure on Ofqual to fix this, if only by printing “OFQUAL WARNING: THE GRADES ON THIS CERTIFICATE ARE ONLY RELIABLE, AT BEST, TO ONE GRADE EITHER WAY” on every certificate – not my statement, but one made by Ofqual’s then Chief Regulator, Dame Glenys Stacey, in evidence to the 2 September 2020 hearing of the Education Select Committee, and in essence equivalent to the fact that about one grade in four is wrong. That would ensure that everyone is aware of the fact that any decision, based on a grade as shown on a certificate, is intrinsically unsafe.

But this – or some other solution – can happen only if your institution, along with others, were to act accordingly. And that can happen only if you, and your colleagues, band together to influence your department, your faculty, your institution.

Yes, that is a bother. Yes, you do have other urgent things to do.

If you do nothing, nothing will happen.

But if you take action, you can make a difference.

Don’t just walk on by.

Dennis Sherwood is a management consultant with a particular interest in organisational cultures, creativity and systems thinking. Over the last several years, Dennis has also been an active campaigner for the delivery of reliable GCSE, AS and A level grades. If you enjoyed this, you might also like https://srheblog.com/tag/sherwood/.