The Office for Students Does Not Care About Students
When the Office for Students (OfS) handed down a record fine to the University of Sussex last year for a failure to uphold freedom of speech, it represented a bold and powerful new era for the regulatory body.
In theory, protecting free speech is a good thing. After all, who wouldn’t want people to speak freely, especially on university campuses? However, a recent decision by the High Court, overturning the fine, has shown that the OfS's mission is politicised in nature and carried on by political appointees who owe their position to successive governments pursuing a particular agenda.
For context, the £585,000 fine was imposed after the anti-trans activist and philosophy professor Kathleen Stock left her position at the university following numerous protests. Following an investigation, the OfS decided that a university policy statement on trans and non-binary equality which required the positive representation of trans people could prevent people from expressing opposing views.
The judge found that there were a number of problems with this decision and the process.
For a start, the policy in question was not a governing document. It therefore didn't have the importance that the OfS attached to it and did nothing to prohibit the expression of gender critical viewpoints.
This is something that probably could have been revealed during the investigation if the OfS had properly engaged with the University of Sussex. Instead, a number of in-person meetings were cancelled at the last minute and so the regulator never actually met with any representative from the university despite taking the time to interview Professor Stock.
However, perhaps the most disturbing conclusion from the judgment was that the OfS acted with bias and that the decision to impose the fine was a foregone conclusion.
At paragraph 438, Judge Lieven said:
“In my view the refusal to take into account the 2024 revisions strongly suggests that the OfS was determined to find significant breaches and therefore had no wish to consider whether the University had now complied. To reach a conclusion that the breaches had been remedied would have undermined the strategy that Ms Lapworth and the OfS had adopted in October 2021, pursued for three and a half years, and invested very significant resources into. The evidence supports a finding that the OfS had closed its mind to anything that would lead to not finding breaches and being unable to therefore sanction the University.”
The ‘Ms. Lapworth’ who is referred to in that paragraph is Susan Lapworth, and she was, until recently, the Chief Executive of the OfS. She was subject to criticism throughout the judgment alongside the so-called ‘free speech tsar’, Dr Arif Ahmed, who remains in position as the OfS Director for Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom. In particular, the judge held that the work of the investigation team “was undermined by the bias and predetermination of Dr Ahmed”.
Some might hope that a change of leadership will help to restore confidence in the OfS as it rebuilds relationships with universities.
Unfortunately, that is unlikely. The OfS is fundamentally rotten to the core and students (whose interests the body is supposed to represent) should reject the overt, politicised actions of the regulator.
In recent years, the OfS has been tasked by both Conservative and Labour-led governments with protecting free speech, but what this has meant in reality is protecting transphobes within higher education from protest and criticism.
Instead of acknowledging that certain views which undermine the humanity of a certain section of the population are likely to cause revulsion and be rejected by parts of the student body, the OfS has, ironically, taken it upon itself to try and force universities to crack down on protests in the name of free speech.
The decision of the High Court has shown us what many already knew to be true: the OfS is more interested in the culture wars than student welfare.
This week on the podcast, we head back to the time of the coronavirus and examine a case about insurance policies under the furlough scheme.
Episode link: https://uklawweekly.com/2026-uksc-14/
Make a difference today,
Marcus