Staff Q&As: Helen Haynes

This time, we're speaking with Helen Haynes, who helps lead the assessments we carry out on the quality of courses at universities and colleges. She explains how her previous role at a university helps her ensure students get high quality experiences today.

Tell us about your role – what do you do at the OfS?

I’m one of the leaders of our work assessing the quality of courses at institutions, making sure they’re meeting our requirements. These requirements include things like making sure courses are appropriately challenging and ensuring students have the support and resources they need to succeed.

We do these assessments when institutions apply to join our Register, which means they get access to benefits such as access to public funding through student loans and grants and the ability to recruit international students. We also do these assessments if we think a registered university or college is at risk of not meeting our requirements. Most institutions work hard to make sure students get good outcomes from their time in higher education – but if that isn’t happening, our regulation helps ensure improvements are made.

What does a typical day look like for you in your role?

A large part of my day is usually spent working closely with our quality teams, planning our work or supporting them to navigate complex issues. I also meet with staff at the universities and colleges we are assessing, as well as sector representative groups to understand more about their views on our approach to assessing quality.

As much of the work we do in quality naturally overlaps with other areas of OfS regulation, I work with colleagues outside of my direct team regularly. This might include working with our core regulatory teams to understand whether the intelligence we hold on an institution might indicate risks to the quality of courses, or with our consumer protection team if our assessments suggest students might not be being treated fairly. Part of being an effective regulator means making sure everyone in the OfS is working towards the same goals.

Can you tell us about an important project you are working on and why it’s important?

I’ve recently been working on a campaign to recruit higher education professionals to our pool of external academic assessors, who help us with their expert judgement when we need to assess the quality and standards of individual universities and colleges. We published a set of case studies to our website where current assessors shared their experiences and what inspired them to work with us – and the response has been fantastic.

It’s been brilliant to see that people working in universities and colleges are keen to work with us in this area, because academic assessors are a crucial part of our quality assessments. The level of interest has also demonstrated how deeply people care about the experiences of students – not just in their own institutions, but across the entire higher education sector.

What aspects of your work excite you the most?

I think many of the issues we look at in quality – like whether courses are taught well and whether students go on to good careers after their studies – are the things that might make or break a students’ experience of higher education.

Having a direct impact on students’ experiences makes it easy to feel passionate about the work I do.

What are the challenges you’re coming up against in your area?

The range of work we do across the quality assessment teams can be very varied. Sometimes we are assessing new small providers wanting to join the regulated higher education system for the first time and sometimes we’re assessing long established universities. All types of institution need to meet our requirements, but they might do that in different ways. Whoever we’re assessing, it’s important for students and institutions that our work is fair and detailed. Coordinating and delivering all that can be challenging and you never quite know what’s coming around the corner!

The way I manage the complexity of our work is by making sure each team has the support it needs to succeed and doing as much forward planning as possible.

Why did you join the OfS? What did you do before you came here and how have your previous experiences informed the way you work now?

Before I came to the OfS, I worked at a large university and had previous experience at another regulator. Joining the OfS felt like a natural choice.

Having worked in higher education, I know how committed people are to delivering good student experiences and how passionately they care about their work. Having an insider’s understanding of institutions has been useful in my role, and it’s always good to remember that we all want students to benefit from a high quality higher education.

If you could give one piece of advice to students in 2026, what would it be?

I get to see the great things that different institutions are doing to support their students to have a good academic experience. So, my advice would be to engage with the academic support services your institution has put in place – it’s there to help you.