If you’ve watched Adolescence, you might recognise the Academy of Live Technology (ALT). The studios at the specialist institution, which offers undergraduate degrees related to live event production and design, were recently used to film the hit Netflix show.
While otherwise a relatively unknown provider, for the UK’s higher education system, ALT’s evolution is something of a success story.
Based in a former mining town in West Yorkshire and one of few higher education providers in the area, for the first?10 years of its life the institution delivered degrees through a franchise partnership with the University of Bolton (now known as the University of Greater Manchester).
In 2020, ALT enrolled itself on to the Office for Students’ (OfS) register and is currently applying for degree-awarding powers.
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ALT’s case demonstrates the English system working as intended – a relatively young, specialist provider in a locality with little other higher education provision taken under the wing of an established university and supported to develop until it is ready to fly solo.
By going “through the franchise route, we’ve been able, in a measured, focused way, to grow the institution”, said Rachel Nicholson, head of institution at ALT. “We’re providing higher education in an area where the majority of young people have historically not gone into higher education or employment.”
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But what about when things don’t go so smoothly?
At the other end of the spectrum to ALT is the likes of the Applied Business Academy, a now-shuttered college that formerly had premises in London and Luton and delivered degrees through franchise and validation partnerships with three universities.
In 2024, the OfS began investigating claims of regulatory breaches at the institution and found, after the college had already shut its doors, that it appeared to have been faking compulsory student work placements.
In some cases, these were recorded as happening at businesses that had ceased to operate, as well as at ones with no clear link to the diploma that candidates were studying towards, such as small cafes, clothing shops and building firms.
Such horror stories are probably more familiar than the success stories to many members of the public, with newspaper headlines – and government press releases – about “bad apples” and “rogue providers” emerging more frequently than people within UK higher education would like.
In March, after the national press revealed further evidence of student loan fraud linked to franchise providers, education minister Bridget Phillipson vowed to crack down on “this appalling misuse of public money”.
And she was true to her word. In May, Phillipson directed the OfS to reprioritise funding for disadvantaged and disabled students and high-cost subjects away from almost all franchise providers.
Alex Proudfoot, chief executive of Independent Higher Education (IHE), which represents non-university higher education institutions, criticised the use of what he called a “sledgehammer policy” to tackle what he saw as a relatively small nut.
“It has been this grant funding that flows to the franchising partner that has made it worth their while,” he told Times Higher Education. “With this grant funding gone, I fear it is the most innovative new providers, established to meet a specific local or industry need, who will find themselves increasingly locked out of the sector.”
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Universities are also increasingly finding themselves in the political and regulatory firing line for a perceived lack of oversight of franchise provision. In May, Leeds Trinity University – one of Applied Business Academy’s partners – received a ?115,000 penalty – the first fine of its kind – from the Office for Students for failing to properly oversee its subcontractual partnerships.
So is there a risk that a small number of “bad apples” could ruin a whole sector’s reputation?
Colleges are certainly worried. So much so that Rory Curley, CEO of London’s Central Film School, warns that trying to catch more unscrupulous providers could do the sector more reputational harm than good – not so much with students but with the minister, who he worries may resort to “blunt instruments” to crack down on abuse of the system.
Universities are concerned that they too could become the victims of poor practice within the sector, particularly given that private institutions may also be registered with the 91茄子 Office to sponsor international students – another area receiving ever-increasing political scrutiny. In May, for instance, The Guardian reported ministerial plans to crack down on international students who apply for asylum. And in the subsequent immigration White Paper, Labour outlined plans to narrow compliance thresholds for student visas, saying the current ones have “left the route open to abuse and exploitation” and accusing education providers of “failing to protect” the “integrity” of the UK’s visa system.
This is expected to have a knock-on effect on both students and providers, with universities withdrawing from recruitment in “riskier” markets such as Nigeria and Pakistan, for fear of losing their sponsorship rights if they fail to meet the new thresholds. The result could be a further fall in international student numbers – and the fees they bring in.
“In my experience, the vast majority of institutions not only take their responsibilities around student sponsorship seriously, they also welcome scrutiny and work hard to maintain high standards,” said Gary Davies, deputy vice-chancellor at London Metropolitan University. “The government would be better served to focus its attention on those providers where standards are falling short, rather than applying broad pressure across the whole sector.”
Similarly, Robin Mason, pro vice-chancellor (international) at the University of Birmingham, said that “while speaking as a sector can create a more powerful voice, challenges arise when there are practices that may create reputational issues for everybody. Where that ought to take us is [to] policy which is risk-based and not uniform. What that looks like needs to be very carefully tailored; but what you don’t want to do is impose significant compliance and regulatory costs…on universities, institutions and providers that present very low risk of non-compliance.”
For some within the sector, more differentiation in the treatment of mainstream universities and for-profit providers – as far as the groups can be separated – would be welcome. But Edward Venning, a partner at Six Ravens Consulting LLP and a former member of the?University of the Arts London’s executive board, cautions against attempting to draw a line between “reputable” and “less reputable” providers since, “at the very best, reputation is a lagging metric, not a leading one. It’s corrosive and unhelpful to explain higher education through status, especially in the area of non-traditional learners. In effect, it tells them they went to the ‘wrong’ uni, when this may have been their only way to access higher education and may have better served them in [terms of] learning gain.”
Instead, Venning said, “It would be useful and strategic to differentiate between providers according to categories of learner need” and to support each group “to develop into best-in-class at a global level”. He said that professional preparation would benefit from such a tailored approach, since it is currently not “the centre of mainstream strategies”.?
Meanwhile, Charlie Tennant, vice-principal at for-profit college the London School of Science and Technology, “would be much more in favour of a more consistent regulatory landscape that enabled for-profit providers to emerge and develop, while bringing them into scope of regulation much quicker”.
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Currently, the OfS does not have the powers to regulate franchise providers at all. But Tennant endorses suggestion that the regulator introduce a new registration category covering them. “Something of this kind would enable better direct oversight, while considering that an awarding partner still has a role to play as the provider students are registering with.”
The idea was proposed in April in response to new rules being consulted on by the Department for Education under which all providers with over 300 students would have to register with it.
An OfS spokesperson noted that the regulator published a last September “to highlight some of our concerns about franchising in higher education. As things stand, our powers in this area are limited – we can act only in relation to registered higher education providers, and franchised delivery providers are not required to register with the OfS.
“We cannot speculate on the outcome of the DfE’s consultation. However, we strongly support plans for new legislation to give us the powers and resources we need to tackle fraud across the higher education sector.”
However, as well as concerns about the burden the DfE’s proposed rules will put on small institutions, there are also doubts about how well the OfS will be able to administer an expanded register, given the pressures it is under.
Charlotte Blant, CEO of TIRO, a Brighton-based science and technology apprenticeship provider, is keen to get her institution on the OfS register, but is currently unable to as applications for new providers remain closed until August due to the OfS’ decision to prioritise other work.
“They’ve got lots on their plate,” she said. “In its current form, [the DfE’s proposal] is not going to work. It needs a major reform.”
Like London’s Central Film School’s Curley, she is against trying to “pile on more regulation” because, perversely, this would actually create more “bad actors”, she believes.
“The more…regulation there is, the more loopholes there are that you can learn how to exploit,” she explains. “What happens is people start behaving in a way that meets the rules rather than meets the needs of the learners and the employers…because they’re just hamstrung by meeting the requirements of the regulation. So I think that you’re going to drive the quality down doing that, rather than up.”
Independent Higher Education’s Proudfoot believes there is a middle ground: “It is entirely possible to design a system of regulation which delivers essential due diligence and the sunlight of transparency to illuminate student choice, while retaining the proportionality that small providers rely on.”
But, first, regulators need “a laser focus on ownership and governance”, including verifying who is running registered institutions, he said.
“The OfS framework in theory requires the senior leadership of registered higher education providers to be ‘fit and proper persons’, but in practice the regulator has never demonstrated the interest or the tools necessary to verify this,” he said.?
“We all need these organisations and the individuals leading them to be clearly and self-evidently trustworthy if we are to avoid the kind of regulatory micromanagement and bureaucratic burden that can cripple innovation and undermine the institutional autonomy which is the foundation of the excellence of UK higher education.”
For franchise provision specifically, the resounding feeling is that universities also need to take more responsibility – a warning repeated once again by the OfS in the wake of Leeds Trinity’s fine.
While they may not be physically on the franchising university’s campus, franchise students remain under the university’s duty of care, said ALT’s Nicholson. She suggests that the power for institutions to franchise out their courses should be subject to regular reviews of the quality and standards of these programmes.
“I do think we have a little bit of a grey area where some side provision hasn’t necessarily come under the radar, and I think that maybe that’s allowed some of these bad actors to be facilitated,” she said.
For Venning, however, much of the concern about private players “seems overstated” – and perhaps rooted in societal attitudes towards higher education outside traditional universities.
“We have a national tradition of higher education as a charitable activity, with resultant suspicion and snobbery towards private provision,” he said. By contrast, “other national systems are much more open [to it], encouraging and relying on it, and regulating it actively and constructively without fuss”.
He argued that improving quality would be best achieved by “aiming for excellence, rather than focusing on bad practice” by a relatively small number of bad actors. The main source of the sector’s reputational problem around international students, he added, was “lax practice (by lots of providers) in the use of recruitment agents”.
“In other words, franchise provision is an important issue not because of (limited)?individual?bad practice, but because it shines a light on a part of the sector which is useful, and deserves help to be part of a?world-class, differentiated?sector,” he said.
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“Thinking about an entire category of education providers as rogue is not helpful. It limits our own system’s ability to evolve through intelligent design, with private providers as an integral part of the mix.”
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