The Education (Student Support) (Amendment) Regulations 2026 are a targeted but important rewrite of England’s student support rules for franchised higher education. Made on 24 April 2026, laid before Parliament on 28 April 2026 and due to come into force on 19 May 2026, the instrument amends the 2011 student support regime and inserts a new Part 2A focused on franchised provision. Although the regulations extend to England and Wales, they apply in relation to England only. The central policy shift is delayed but substantial. For courses starting on or after 1 September 2028, a franchised course will not keep automatic student-support designation unless the delivery body is a qualifying franchised provider. In effect, the government is moving from reliance on the lead provider’s registered status alone to a model in which the status and scale of the delivery partner also determine whether new students can access support. (gov.uk)
The new Part 2A gives franchising a broad working definition. A provider is treated as a franchised provider where it teaches or delivers all or part of a course to students registered at an English registered provider and does so on that provider’s behalf. A student becomes a franchised student where more than 50 per cent of the course, measured by modules, credits or another academic unit, is or may be taught by one or more franchised providers, including sub-contracting further down the chain. That drafting matters because the headcount is not confined to home undergraduate recruits or to one contract. Department for Education guidance says the threshold count covers full-time, part-time and online students, includes domestic, international and self-funded students studying at level 4 or above, and excludes apprentices and credit-only or module-only study. The regulations also aggregate group undertakings for headcount purposes, so separate entities can be treated as one provider where the legislation requires it. (gov.uk)
A qualifying franchised provider falls into one of three classes under the instrument: a registered provider, an exempt franchised provider, or an unregistered provider below the threshold. The exempt category is deliberately weighted towards public-service bodies. It covers, among others, schools and academies, academy trusts, federated schools, further education sector institutions, local authorities, mayoral combined authorities, NHS bodies, police and crime commissioners, government departments and the armed forces. The exemption is narrower than some delivery partners may expect. Department for Education guidance states that joint ventures are generally still in scope, even where their owners would themselves be exempt, because the joint venture is treated as a separate legal entity. For lead providers, that means due diligence has to look through branding and ownership structures to the legal body actually delivering the course. (gov.uk)
The 300-student line is now the decisive compliance metric. Under the regulations, the Secretary of State must determine the student population of non-exempt unregistered franchised providers during a designation period, using Office for Students data from a calculation reference period. For the first implementation cycle, the government response said the decision point would be September 2027 and would be based on student numbers from the 2025 to 2026 academic year, determining designation for new students starting in 2028 to 2029. There is, however, a transitional safeguard for some providers already in the OfS process. A franchised provider that applied to join the register before 1 July 2026, had its application accepted as meeting OfS criteria before 1 September 2027, and was still awaiting a final decision at that point, is treated as qualifying for the academic year beginning 1 September 2028. That provision is aimed at avoiding a funding gap caused by administrative timing rather than provider conduct. (assets.publishing.service.gov.uk)
The instrument also creates a formal notice-and-appeal process. After determining a provider’s status, the Secretary of State must issue a notice of status confirming the student population finding, whether the provider counts as below-threshold, and whether courses taught by that provider in the implementation year will be designated for the purposes of section 22 of the 1998 Act. Providers then have one month to appeal in writing if they reasonably believe they are exempt or that their student population will remain below 300. For the first phase of implementation there is an additional, time-limited transition route. Until 31 August 2029, a provider that receives a notice saying it is not below-threshold may appeal on the basis that it had fewer than 300 students in the academic year used as the appeal reference period. In policy terms, the design combines a firm threshold with a short correction window rather than a rolling margin of tolerance. (gov.uk)
The most severe mechanism in the package is the correction year. Where an unregistered provider was treated as below-threshold and its courses were therefore designated, but it later emerges that the provider reached 300 or more students at any point between the start of the calculation reference period and the end of the implementation year, the Secretary of State may revoke designation for courses starting in the following academic year after the breach comes to light. The regulations also allow the Secretary of State to disapply that revocation where the circumstances justify it. This is not simply a paper sanction. Department for Education guidance says a correction year removes student finance designation for new students even if the provider has registered with OfS in the meantime. Existing students are treated differently: the consultation response and DfE guidance make clear that students who started before the 2028 to 2029 implementation year remain eligible for support through to course completion, and students who suspend before a correction year should be able to return under arrangements secured by the lead provider. (gov.uk)
The policy rationale is set out most clearly in the government’s impact assessment. It says unregistered delivery partners taught 80,045 franchised students in 2022 to 2023, representing 59 per cent of all franchised students and 3.4 per cent of higher education students overall. The same document says a 300-student threshold would have captured 83 per cent of franchised students at unregistered providers, and that providers with 300 or more undergraduate franchised students accounted for 92 per cent of undergraduate student finance linked to unregistered franchised provision in 2023 to 2024. The regulatory case is not framed only around fraud, but fraud is plainly part of it. The impact assessment records detected fraud of about £2.16 million in 2022 to 2023, while the Office for Students published sector-level data in October 2025 showing weaker continuation, completion and progression outcomes for students taught under subcontractual arrangements than for the sector as a whole. Read together, those documents explain why the regulations focus on scale, direct oversight and the quality risks attached to large delivery chains. (consult.education.gov.uk)
For universities and colleges acting as lead providers, the immediate task is contractual and analytical rather than operational on campus. They will need a reliable line of sight over who actually teaches each course, whether more than half of provision is being delivered outside the registered institution, how many franchised students a delivery partner has across all partnerships, and whether an OfS registration application needs to be accelerated before the September 2027 decision point. For smaller delivery partners, the choice is equally clear: stay credibly below 300, fit within an exemption, or prepare for direct registration. For students and advisers, the timing point is the main reassurance. The instrument comes into force on 19 May 2026, but the decisive designation change applies to courses beginning on or after 1 September 2028. That gives the sector just over two academic cycles to reset partnership models, while preserving support eligibility for existing students and focusing the new controls on entrants from 2028 to 2029 onwards. (gov.uk)