Higher Education and Research Bill: CMA recommendations and DfE response
Published 25 November 2016
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This publication is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/cma-recommendations-to-government/higher-education-and-research-bill-cma-recommendations-and-dfe-response
The CMA’s recommendations to government on competition issues in the Higher Education and Research Bill. See the correspondence page for the CMA’s full letter of 27 July 2016. The government sent a private response to our recommendations.
| CMA recommendation | Government response |
|---|---|
| 1. The government should consider requiring all validated providers to have ‘approved’ status, and that where a validated provider has ‘approved’ status, the responsibility for enforcing the baseline regulation is held by the Office for Students. | The government said that it believed that the validating partner must have regulatory responsibility for the validated institution in order to ensure that what was offered was of appropriate quality. It did not take on this recommendation. |
| 2. The government should implement a disciplinary level Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) as soon as is practical and that it consider making the link between the fee cap and the TEF award operate at the disciplinary rather than institutional level. | The government said that it was keen to move to a subject-level TEF as soon as was practicable. But a TEF-fee cap link at a disciplinary, rather than institutional, level would be confusing for students and difficult to administer. |
| 3. The government should consider introducing a more flexible fee cap for accelerated courses, while maintaining the same aggregated fee cap as a standard duration course. | The government said that it was grateful for this recommendation and would look at it and the evidence we had provided for it carefully. |