Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what discussions he has had with the Office for Students to encourage more timely responses to Notifications.

Notifications are important parts of how the Office for Students (OfS) regulates providers. If students, staff, or members of the public feel that a university or college is not meeting these requirements, they can submit a notification to the OfS.

However, a notification is different from a complaint. A notification informs the OfS, as the regulator, about concerns or issues individuals have about a registered provider. The OfS carefully considers all notifications received where a concern is raised that a provider is not meeting, or is at risk of breaching, regulatory requirements. It may consider a notification, alongside any other information, to decide whether it needs to intervene and use its regulatory powers.

The OfS recently published new operational measures which report on the performance of their core regulatory activity. The OfS website outlines that since 1 January 2021, the OfS have received around 60 notifications each quarter. For most quarters OfS resolved a similar number of cases, resulting in few unresolved cases.

As of the end of quarter 2 of 2022, the maximum length of time the OfS would expect to take to resolve a new notification was 96 days, with the current mean average to respond to notifications in this quarter being 26 days.