Quality assessments for registered providers

What does the assessment team do?

Assessment teams including external academic experts are commissioned by us to undertake quality assessments of registered institutions.

The assessment team focus on the areas of potential concern indicated by data or other regulatory intelligence. They consider relevant conditions of registration relating to quality and provide advice to the OfS.

The process for any particular assessment will depend on the nature of the potential concerns and the complexity of the provision or the institution being assessed.

The assessment team will usually visit the institution and will request relevant information throughout the process. They use this information to draft an assessment report for us.

How are decisions about quality made?

The assessment team do not make regulatory judgements – we use their assessment report, and other information we have about an institution, to make decisions about whether that institution is complying with our quality and standards conditions of registration.

Interventions

If we decide that an institution is not complying with our quality and standards conditions, we consider the context of the breach to determine whether we will intervene and, if so, what we will do. Broadly speaking, we consider:

• Scope of the quality assessment: The areas the assessment team focused on.
• Scale of the breach: We are more likely to intervene, for example, if a large number of students are affected, taxpayers’ interests have been severely affected or there is risk of reputational damage to the higher education sector as a whole.
• Impact on students. We consider the breach’s impact on current and future students. We are more likely to take action where the negative impact on students is significant and this is likely to continue without our intervention.

Regulatory interventions could include more intensive monitoring requirements or a specific condition of registration. Full details about the range of interventions we could use can be found in Regulatory advice 15: Monitoring and intervention.

We may also decide to undertake a further quality assessment to establish whether a breach has been remedied.

Read more about how we might intervene.

Publication of decisions

When the quality assessment is complete and our decision has been made, we typically expect to publish:

• a summary of the decisions we've made
• the assessment report
• a case report, for institutions where breaches of conditions of registration have been found.

Changes to our processes

From April 2026, we typically intend to make regulatory judgements about quality at the same time as publishing assessment reports. This means our judgements on quality will be made more quickly than in previous rounds of quality assessments.

This will enable us to weigh the assessment evidence of what a university or college is currently delivering, with less emphasis on forward plans and intentions. Under our revised process, breaches that are sufficiently serious and affect students may lead to the full range of regulatory sanctions.