"The Governor View" - Widening participation and the Equality of Opportunity Risk Register

The Equality of Opportunity Risk Register, announced last month by the Office for Students, represents a new direction of travel, according to John Blake, the OfS director for fair access and participation.

The aim is to build a framework that “captures the scale of the sector’s work on equality, and channels it into a coherent, co-ordinated and compelling alignment”.

Currently out for consultation, the Register envisaged by the OfS and to be published in February 2023, will identify sector-wide risks, and which student groups are most affected by each one.

It will be utilised in access and participation plans (APPs), and along with institution-specific risks, will create a “public collective record” of the most pressing challenges individual universities and colleges are taking on, the interventions they propose to use to tackle them, and the methods in place to understand what success looks like.

It comes on the back of the announcement early this year that universities and colleges need to work much more closely with schools and colleges to improve exam results - a requirement included in the government’s levelling up White Paper.

In response to that, institutions were asked to hastily update APPs showing their work in supporting attainment. The risk register necessitates another overhaul of APPs to fit the new framework and, from a governance point of view, may well require an input of resources.

Proposals in the consultation mean APPs will now need to set out actions over a four-year, rather than a five year period. Each APP will include an introduction and strategic aims, risks to equality of opportunity, objectives and intervention strategies, within 30 pages. The OfS says that objectives should be translated into numerical targets with measurable outcomes-based milestones set over the duration of a plan. Details about the financial commitment required to deliver the interventions also has to be provided.

Institutions will have to identify risks to equality of opportunity by conducting an assessment of its performance using the OfS access and participation data dashboard as the primary source of evidence.

According to governors, the February 2023 publication date for the OfS’s risk register leaves little time to get to grips with its demands before new APPs have to be submitted.

“It will mean developing plans up to spring 2023 and having them approved in autumn. We haven’t seen the risk register even in draft and we have to start writing in a few months,” said one.

Despite these concerns, however, the new approach to access and participation is unlikely to cause too much alarm, in the view of the governor at a Russell Group university.

“The regulator is trying to operate in an evidence-based way and it’s always difficult for people in universities to oppose evidence-based policy initiatives,” he said. “It’s an area where government, the OfS and universities’ interests are all nicely aligned. Most universities have a genuine commitment to widening participation. The regulator could have made a lot of enemies very quickly if it had come in with a blunderbuss. But it has gone methodically in an evidence-based way.”

A governor at a new university in the north agrees: “I don’t see any particular issues with the proposed changes,” she said. “It fits with the direction of travel that the OfS have been going down and seems like it will try to take into account context, which is important. It may be that the devil is in the detail once we see what the risk register looks like in practice.”

The phrase is also used by a governor at an alternative provider.

“The principal is fine. Let’s have a common definition, or list or framework, that we consider to be within scope when we are talking about this issue,” he said. “But the devil is in the detail – what is actually going to appear on that list? And how useful it is going to be? Or will it contain the kind of things that universities have and are thinking about quite a lot already.”

As the consultation was launched, the OfS hinted at content. Sector-level risks, it said, could include the lower numbers of disadvantaged students being admitted to selective universities, attainment gaps between different school pupils and the lack of non-traditional routes in HE, such as degree apprenticeships. The latter has been a particular focus of Robert Halfon, the chair of the education select committee and a former skills minister, who has just been appointed the new skills, apprenticeships and higher education minister.

While the thinking behind the risk register might be sound, governors are not underestimating the challenge of meeting the demands of the new direction of travel at a time when budgets are increasingly tight, inflation is rising and the Treasury is looking at ways to reduce a £60 billion financial “black hole.

“Beefing up contact with schools and attainment-raising is expensive outreach,” said a Russell Group governor. “It costs real money to do it properly - although the OfS would probably argue that there is money to be saved on initiatives that are not evidence-based and doing things more efficiently and effectively than always spending more money in total.”

The “getting on”, as well as the “getting in” aspect of widening participation also costs money. However, governors point out that investment in areas such as academic support may help improve the outcomes connected to the new B3 conditions which institutions are now being judged against.

“Universities and their governing bodies genuinely care about this stuff but they do, like everybody else, respond to incentives,” said one.

Governors are aware of the “known unknowns” around how the risk register will function in practise. The governor of an institution in London explains: “Until you see how it operates you don’t know, as an institution, how it changes the prioritisation of work. Much of what is in the consultation is probably pretty consistent with and recognisable to institutions that have been setting targets in their old APPs, and I’d bet we will see similar things on the risk register. But then you have what they are calling emerging risks, based around things that arise and are not based on student characteristics. How is an institution expected to work out what could potentially happen?”

He also raises the new four year cycle for APPs and the proviso that updates can be added when necessary.

“It seems to say that if big risks emerge, they will be added on a yearly basis so presumably you have to update your plan. And what about things you’re trying to tackle but on a longer time frame? A good example here is awarding gaps by ethnicity: some of steps might relate to things like increasing academic role models. But bringing in more black professors, for instance, could need a 20 to 30 year time period, given the low numbers of black professors nationally.”

The task of prioritising risk and establishing a hierarchy of need may well involve input from boards of governors. An indication from the OfS that its expectations for the volume of work institutions will undertake should “relate much more closely to their capacity” was welcomed by governors.

However one governor of a university in London pointed out that this created a grey area that is open to interpretation, which can “lead to a bit of disquiet because we don’t know what the regulatory comeback will be”.

“It’s about being proportionate in the risks that you seek to address, so if you are a small specialist provider, the OfS accepts you might focus on, say, two,” he said. “That tells us that they are not expecting everyone to do everything, but nor do they give you a general idea about what is enough or whether you can say as an institution ‘we know this is a risk but we are not going to try to address it because we are prioritising other things’. We don’t know what the regulatory reaction to that would be.”

Governors said work with schools and colleges was increasing. A Russell Group governor pointed to growing partnerships to improve routes for young people and mentioned that the principal of a local college had been appointed to the university’s governing body.

However, some governors highlighted the increasing bureaucratic burden in the area of WP, which is particularly challenging for smaller institutions.

“We’ve just been through three consultations and here we are with another one,” said one. “When is the time to actually do the outreach work?”

A lack of clarity about the “regulatory heft” of the risk register was also highlighted by a governor at an alternative provider.

But the apparent shift from “closing the gap” to “minimising the risk” in access and participation leaves governors hopeful that the OfS recognises that higher education cannot solve all of societies’ problems and that WP is being seen more as an ongoing process of best evidenced work.

“Perhaps the OfS is understanding that you can’t necessarily solve the problem of low attainment, for instance, but you can take action,” said one governor. “Work with schools on attainment is not going to lead to sudden jumps in GCSE results but is still worthwhile and will reduce risk of uneven opportunities. It looks like they are not expecting huge sea changes overnight with that work but have come to the view very strongly that lots of these gaps start to take root at an early stage and therefore it is right, when you are considering risk, to tackle it early.”