England Higher Education Regulatory Register Change Signals
Pricing
from $10.00 / 1,000 ofs regulatory change signals
England Higher Education Regulatory Register Change Signals
Track official OfS provider registration, condition and regulatory attribute changes.
Pricing
from $10.00 / 1,000 ofs regulatory change signals
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Starshape Tools
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8 days ago
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This is a regulatory change-intelligence Actor, not an OfS provider directory or provider lookup scraper. It monitors official changes to provider registration, specific conditions, and selected regulatory attributes. It does not infer provider risk, severity, educational quality, endorsement, or compliance beyond the Office for Students source text.
Official source and identity
Every live run downloads the official XLSX linked by the Guide to the OfS Register. UKPRN is the stable identity and is canonicalised with String(value).trim() without recreating it numerically. The full content SHA-256 is the source version. Response Last-Modified and ETag are recorded when supplied; fetch time is labelled only as fetch time and is never presented as an official extract date.
The current workbook supports these signals: NEW_PROVIDER_REGISTERED, PROVIDER_DEREGISTERED, PROVIDER_NAME_CHANGED, REGISTRATION_CATEGORY_CHANGED, SPECIFIC_CONDITION_ADDED, SPECIFIC_CONDITION_REMOVED, DEGREE_AWARDING_POWER_CHANGED, UNIVERSITY_TITLE_STATUS_CHANGED, FEE_LIMIT_CHANGED, TEF_OUTCOME_CHANGED, and TRADING_NAME_CHANGED.
The primary Register sheet contains currently registered providers but no explicit registration-date/status column. A provider is treated as newly registered only when its UKPRN was absent from the previous validated Register and appears in the current one. A provider is treated as deregistered only when it disappears from the Register and is explicitly present in the workbook's section 22 or section 18 deregistration sheet. Any unexplained disappearance is a source anomaly, not a deregistration signal. Fresh baselines never emit every provider as new.
Specific ongoing conditions and trading names are Unicode-normalised, whitespace-normalised, deduplicated and deterministically sorted. Reordering or line-break-only changes produce no signal. Degree-awarding powers and university-title fields are compared as official composite values. The current fee field contains the official fee-limit category (for example Higher), not a numeric price, so the Actor preserves the official string. TEF is also preserved as supplied and is not converted into a quality score.
Privacy and safe state
The source workbook includes provider contact addresses and email addresses. These fields, websites, contact-person details, and raw rows are excluded from the canonical snapshot and Dataset. Signals retain only UKPRN, provider name, regulatory attributes, compact before/after values and source provenance (PRIVACY_MINIMISATION_PASS).
Live processing is fetch XLSX → validate ZIP/workbook/sheets/columns → privacy projection → normalize → stable-key and anomaly guards → load previous snapshot → diff/filter → Dataset → OUTPUT → snapshot commit. Snapshot commit is last, so fetch, parse, Dataset, or OUTPUT failures retain the previous good state. Guards cover minimum bytes/provider count, XLSX magic, required sheets/columns, null or conflicting UKPRNs, row collapse, empty workbook, malformed workbook, and unexplained disappearance.
A fresh run writes no Dataset items, reports BASELINE_INITIALIZED, and stores the complete snapshot. An unchanged source emits no signals. maxItems limits Dataset output only. mode: "sample" is the free Console prefill: it performs no HTTP, never opens the production named KVS, uses deterministic fixtures through the production normalize/diff/filter path, emits every implemented signal type, and returns snapshotUpdated: false.
Licence and limitations
Contains information from the Office for Students licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The OfS copyright page states that OfS-owned data and content are reusable under OGL with acknowledgement; separately identified third-party content requires separate permission. This Actor uses no OfS logo and does not imply official status or endorsement.
Limitations include upstream corrections, workbook schema changes, the lack of an explicit registration date in the current Register sheet, categorical rather than numeric fee-limit data, and source publication timing. Output is monitoring evidence, not a regulatory or quality judgement.
