Our Strategy and Operating Plan
In 2025, the OIA began delivering its new strategy, built around two connected aims: to be trusted and valued for the way we resolve complaints, and to have impact by helping the sector handle complaints better and use learning to improve students’ experiences.
These aims are the ways in which our charitable purpose of advancing education for public benefit through the independent review of student complaints in England and Wales and, by using learning from complaints to help improve policies and practices were fulfilled.
Our new strategy gave clearer shape to our work across four priorities: casework, stakeholder engagement, strengthening our evidence base, and organisational and cultural development. Throughout the year, these priorities helped us respond not only to the complaints brought to us, but also to the wider pressures facing us as an ombuds service at a pivotal moment of change.
Against a backdrop of a 17% increase in cases, a major focus of the year was making sure our service remained timely, accessible and fair. The Operating Plan for 2025 committed us to a casework approach with service users at its heart, focused on effective resolution and remedy.
The Operating Report shows strong delivery against that aim: we responded to 98 per cent of enquiries within two working days, made 95 per cent of eligibility decisions or requests for further information within 10 working days, and closed 93 per cent of cases within six months of receipt, exceeding each of the timeliness targets we had set for ourselves.
But 2025 was not only about handling more complaints. It was also about increasing the OIA’s impact beyond individual cases. Our new strategy places greater emphasis on influencing improvement across the sector, and during the year we expanded our engagement with students, student representative bodies and providers. We ran 11 webinars attended by more than 1,000 delegates, held discussion groups for providers, SRBs and students, and visited 18 providers and their SRBs.
We also continued to share learning from our casework in more practical and targeted ways, including work on harassment and sexual misconduct, artificial intelligence and academic misconduct, and student protection. This reflects a central aim of the strategy: not simply to review complaints independently and fairly, but to use what we learn to support better complaints handling and fairer practice across higher education.
A further strand of work in 2025 was strengthening the evidence, systems and organisational foundations that support our role. The Operating Plan identified the need to improve the quality of our data and insight, and to strengthen the organisation so that it can respond effectively to growing demand and future change. During the year, we reviewed how our case-handling system and data structures were working in practice, identifying opportunities to improve consistency, reduce duplication and support deeper analysis.
At the same time, we invested in leadership and management development, refreshed communication strategy, renewed employee voice arrangements, and continued to embed our commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion in both our service and our internal development. Alongside recruitment to the Board, under our new governance arrangements, this work helped build the resilience, capability and accountability needed to deliver the strategy over the longer term.
Taken together, 2025 was the first year of putting our new strategy into practice. It showed the OIA responding effectively to record demand while also laying the groundwork for longer-term change: a more user-focused casework process, stronger engagement and influence, a better evidence base, and a service more equipped to deliver for its users.