21 academic support, the redesign of the curriculum, timetabling or assessment, and a stronger emphasis on analytics to monitor student engagement and deploy support services effectively and efficiently. Student wellbeing risks are more tightly defined, primarily referring to mental health needs, as well as financial hardship. Controls and mitigating actions point to increasing integrated, end-to-end student support services, drawing on professional and peer support, close collaboration with Student Unions, and clear pathways for internal and external referral where needed. Risk commentary and recommendations: While estimates vary, the last five years has seen a notable increase in the proportion of students living at home and commuting to university. Coupled with a substantial rise in students working in term time to cover living costs (68% of full time undergraduates now combine work and study during term time13), this is resulting in lower levels of in-person attendance on campus and less time spent on independent study and engaging with extracurricular activities. Interestingly, university strategic risk registers tend not to reference these fundamental, underlying changes in student choices and behaviours. From a regulatory standpoint, the government has noted that “between 13% and 18% of providers failed to meet OfS minimum expectations on outcomes for full-time first degree students14”. This observation, coupled with challenges around specific groups of students at individual providers, continues to drive OfS’ regulatory monitoring, investigations and action. Additionally, the OfS has also recently closed a consultation on reforming the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). This moots the possibility that in future only institutions meeting a certain quality standard will be able to increase their tuition fees in line with inflation, which could have serious consequences for financial sustainability. While the outcome of the TEF consultation is awaited, this analysis demonstrates that institutions are continuing to undertake significant and ongoing activity to address student experience and outcome risks, with investments in underpinning technology and analytics, academic support, and student services despite financial constraints. Typical audit committee engagement in this area is through an annual report on OfS compliance, although not all institutions do this. 2025 also saw the publication of the national review into student suicide deaths15. This highlights circumstances where harm arose “not from a lack of concern, but from failures in institutional processes – such as errors in academic administration, uncertainty around escalation and restrictive interpretations of consent”16. We note that while some governing bodies or audit committees annually review information and lessons learned from serious safeguarding cases or student deaths, this practice varies widely between institutions. We recommend that audit committees should: • Understand the composition of their study community and familiarise themselves with different living, study and work experience patterns; • Ensure that student experience, wellbeing and outcome risks are reflected in the strategic risk register, or if not, that the rationale for this is clear; • Satisfy themselves where and how second and third line assurance is obtained on the robustness of safeguarding and the regular review and application of lessons learned from serious cases and student deaths; • Ensure that Committee members are familiar with the core B3 datasets, National Student Survey data, and how to interpret the results; • Request an annual report on compliance with OfS conditions of registration; and • Seek assurance on the quality, timeliness and reliability of student attendance data, and core retention, progression, and outcome metrics and statutory data returns; and Familiarise themselves with the Teaching Excellence Framework and the outcomes from the OfS consultation. 13 https://www.hepi.ac.uk/reports/student-academic-experience-survey2025/ 14 https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/data-and-analysis/sectordistribution-of-student-outcomes-and-experience-measures-datadashboard/ 15 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-review-ofhigher-education-student-suicide-deaths 16 https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2026/02/08/weekend-reading-parliamentslatest-debate-on-duty-of-care-what-problem-are-we-really-trying-tosolve/
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