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Third party arrangements and what must be notified

The obligation varies and the assumption is usually wrong.

Where another party delivers, assesses or recruits on a provider's behalf, most frameworks impose written agreement requirements and, in some cases, an obligation to notify the regulator within a set period.

The commonest error is assuming that a marketing or recruitment arrangement falls outside the requirement. Where the party is acting on the provider's behalf in relation to services to students, it generally does not.

The provider remains responsible for everything done under the arrangement, which is worth restating because it is the point most frequently misunderstood in commercial discussions.

Written agreements have required content in most frameworks, and an agreement drafted commercially without reference to those requirements will usually be missing several of them.

Whether notification is required, in what period, and what happens if it was not given, are specific questions for the applicable framework and the regulator's current guidance, and they change. Check rather than infer.

The other third party question worth settling early is what happens to learners if the arrangement ends. Learners recruited and taught by a partner are the provider's students, and an arrangement that terminates without a transition plan leaves the provider with an obligation it has no operational capacity to meet.