There is something useful, if occasionally disorientating, about watching a new regulatory system come into being. Most of the time, regulation arrives already embedded in institutional practice: the conditions of registration, the monitoring cycles, the intervention thresholds are part of the furniture long before anyone thinks to ask what assumptions they rest on or whose interests they were designed to protect. Wales, with the publication of Medr’s regulatory framework this week, offers a rare opportunity to observe the architecture while the concrete is still setting, and to ask the prior question that operational familiarity tends to suppress: what is this system designed to do, and what theory of institutional behaviour does it assume?
The framework is extensive. At 142 pages, with supplementary documents covering intervention powers, a quality framework and a learner engagement code, it represents a serious and detailed attempt to define what registered providers in Wales will need to demonstrate and how Medr will assess them. Registration opens shortly and a new cross-tertiary register will be operational from August, making this a live and consequential document rather than a consultation exercise. What follows here is not an account of its contents, which governors and senior leaders in Wales will need to engage with in detail, but a reflection on some of the choices embedded in its design and on what those choices might suggest about the purposes that regulation can serve.
The cross-tertiary experiment
Medr’s framework is the first cross-tertiary regulatory system in the UK, setting conditions that apply across further and higher education within a single regulatory architecture. That is a structural claim of some significance. The separation of FE and HE regulation in England has long been treated as natural, reflecting genuine differences in mission, student profile and the character of institutional accountability. Medr’s design implies that those differences, whilst real, are less fundamental than the things the two sectors share: the duty to support learner welfare, to demonstrate financial sustainability, to evidence the quality of provision and to engage meaningfully with those they serve.
Whether that implication proves generative in practice, or whether the framework encounters friction at the points where FE and HE governance traditions diverge, remains to be seen. The framework’s architects have chosen to treat the boundary between the two sectors as permeable rather than fixed, and the logic of that choice will be tested as providers of different sizes, missions and histories begin to engage with the same registration conditions. It is an experiment, in the most useful sense of that word: a deliberate decision to find out what happens when a premise that has been assumed rather than tested is finally put to work.
Data as a prompt, not a verdict
Perhaps the most telling phrase in the full document is also one of the quietest. Medr states that it “considers data to be a trigger for a conversation with providers in the first instance.” This is not a throwaway line. It is a statement of regulatory philosophy, and it sits in deliberate contrast to approaches elsewhere that have moved progressively towards numerical thresholds: minimum floors beneath which a provider’s data must not fall if it is to avoid intervention. That alternative approach encodes a particular assumption about what data can reveal and how reliably it can substitute for judgment. Medr’s framing assumes something different: that a number requires context before it warrants a response, and that the regulatory relationship begins with inquiry rather than adjudication.
This is not naivety. The framework is clear that Medr holds genuine powers of intervention, ranging from advice and directions through to deregistration, and that full compliance with the governance and management condition must be achieved by August 2027. But the ordering matters. A regulatory system that begins with conversation is making a set of bets: that providers will engage constructively when asked, that contextual explanation will illuminate rather than obscure, and that the intelligence accumulated through dialogue will be more useful than a binary assessment against a fixed number. These are reasonable bets. They are also bets, and it will be worth watching, as Medr moves from framework to operation, how they hold under the pressures of a diverse and financially stretched sector.
What governing bodies are being asked to hold
The framework places considerable weight on governing bodies, and it is worth pausing on what that weight actually comprises. Boards are expected to carry collective responsibility for oversight, strategy, financial sustainability, subcontracted provision, learner welfare, learner engagement, equality of opportunity and compliance with the Welsh language condition, amongst other requirements. The self-evaluation demands alone span governance effectiveness, welfare arrangements and Welsh language strategy, with action plans required and subject to Medr’s call-in powers if concerns are raised or identified.
None of this is unreasonable in isolation. Each requirement addresses something that conscientious boards should already be attending to, and the framework’s acknowledgement that different parts of the sector will legitimately prioritise different outcomes suggests a degree of contextual sensitivity that is welcome. But the aggregation matters. At a moment when many institutions are managing significant financial pressure, when the pool of individuals willing and available to serve as governors is not unlimited, and when board capacity is itself an institutional resource that can be stretched, the cumulative burden of regulatory expectation warrants honest acknowledgement. There is a reasonable question here, not about the legitimacy of what Medr is asking, but about whether the infrastructure for effective governance across the Welsh tertiary sector is keeping pace with the expectations now formally placed upon it.
A question
Two regulatory systems now operate in the same country, each designed with care and each the product of genuine policy deliberation. They have made different foundational choices: about the relationship between data and judgment, about the function of dialogue in oversight, about where to draw the line between prescription and professional discretion. It would be too simple to suggest that one approach is right and the other is wrong. Regulatory context, legal frameworks and the particular histories of institutional relationships in each nation all bear on what is appropriate, and neither system has yet had the opportunity to demonstrate what it can produce over time.
What the existence of both does offer, however, is something the sector rarely has access to: a comparative vantage point. As Medr’s framework moves from paper to practice, and as its data-as-conversation approach encounters the realities of a diverse and financially pressured sector, questions about whether dialogue-first regulation produces better outcomes for learners, more constructive engagement from providers and a more sustainable regulatory relationship may, in time, become answerable. That seems worth watching, carefully and without premature conclusions, from whichever side of the border one happens to be working.