England changes postgraduate loan rules for franchised courses

The government has made a quiet but important change to postgraduate student finance in England. The Education (Student Support for Postgraduate Provision) (Amendment) Regulations 2026 were made on 2 June 2026, laid before Parliament on 4 June 2026 and come into force on 25 June 2026. According to the text published on legislation.gov.uk, the changes affect postgraduate Master’s loans and postgraduate doctoral loans. If that already sounds heavy going, the simplest reading is this: ministers are tightening the rules on when a postgraduate course can count for student support if teaching is carried out by another provider on a university’s behalf. The regulations extend to England and Wales in legal terms, but they apply in relation to England only.

One phrase sits at the centre of the whole instrument: a ‘designated course’. That is the legal label for a course that counts for postgraduate student support. So the real issue here is not whether a course exists, but whether it still qualifies for public loan funding. To understand that, you need one more term. A ‘franchised provider’ is an organisation teaching all or part of a course on behalf of a registered provider in England. In everyday terms, you may enrol with one university, but more than half your teaching might be delivered somewhere else. If more than 50 per cent of the course is taught that way, the student counts as a ‘franchised student’ under the new rules.

For students starting before 1 September 2028, the position is still relatively broad. A postgraduate course can continue to be designated if it is provided by a registered provider, or by an unregistered provider acting on behalf of a registered provider in England. So although the regulations take effect on 25 June 2026, the biggest shift in course eligibility is aimed at later start dates. **What this means for students:** if you are already studying, or you expect to begin a franchised postgraduate course before 1 September 2028, these regulations do not suddenly remove support overnight. The tighter test is mainly about courses beginning on or after 1 September 2028.

From 1 September 2028, the gateway becomes stricter. A course taught through a franchising arrangement will only be designated for postgraduate support if the teaching provider is a ‘qualifying franchised provider’. The regulations say that means one of three things: the provider is itself registered, it is an unregistered provider with fewer than 300 franchised students, or it falls into an exempt public or state-funded category. Those exempt bodies include organisations such as schools, academy trusts, further education institutions, local authorities, NHS bodies, government departments and the armed forces. The direction of travel is clear. Registered providers remain inside the system, smaller unregistered providers can still qualify, and certain public bodies are excluded from the stricter threshold. Larger unregistered franchised providers face a much narrower route.

The 300-student threshold is one of the most important details in the whole regulation. The Secretary of State must decide an unregistered franchised provider’s student population using data published by the Office for Students, usually by looking back to an earlier academic year. If the provider has fewer than 300 franchised students, it can be treated as ‘below threshold’ and still qualify. If it has 300 or more, it does not get that easier route. And the count is wider than some readers might expect. It can include full-time and part-time students, online provision and courses that do not themselves receive student finance, as long as they are level 4 or above. Apprenticeships and module-only study are left out. So the threshold is not just about the students drawing these particular postgraduate loans; it is about the provider’s wider franchised teaching footprint. There is also a built-in warning. If a provider has little or no data for the reference period, it may initially be treated as being under 300. But if it plans to reach 300 or more in the year the course starts, it must notify the Secretary of State, and it will then be treated as being at or above the threshold.

The regulations also create a paper trail around those decisions. The Secretary of State must issue an unregistered franchised provider with a ‘notice of status’ confirming its assessed student population, whether it is below the threshold and whether courses it teaches in the relevant year will be designated for support. Providers can appeal that notice, but they must do so in writing within one month. There is a second stage as well. If a provider is treated as below threshold and it later turns out that its student population was actually 300 or more at some point between the reference period and the end of the implementation year, the Secretary of State may revoke designation for courses starting in the following academic year. The regulations call that the ‘correction year’. In plain English, the government is giving itself room to fix later admissions decisions if a provider’s scale has been understated.

There is a transition route for providers already trying to regularise their position. If a franchised provider applied to join the Office for Students register before 1 July 2026, had that application confirmed as meeting the OfS criteria before 1 September 2027, and still had no final decision by that date, it will be treated as if it were a qualifying franchised provider for the academic year beginning on 1 September 2028. A separate temporary appeal rule runs until 31 August 2029. It allows a provider to challenge a notice saying it is not below threshold if it reasonably believes its student population was actually under 300 in the earlier appeal reference period. That is a narrow transitional point, but it matters because it gives borderline providers one more chance to dispute the official count.

For universities and partner institutions, the policy signal is hard to miss. The automatic designation of postgraduate courses delivered by unregistered providers on behalf of registered ones is being ended. Publicly backed student support will still follow some franchised courses, but not on the same open basis as before. That matters because franchising can be hard for applicants to spot. The university name on the course page is not always the same as the organisation doing most of the teaching. Under these rules, that distinction becomes more than an administrative detail. It can affect whether a course is eligible for loan support at all.

This is the sort of legal text that can look distant until you translate it into everyday decisions. If you are choosing a postgraduate course, especially one delivered through a partner college or another teaching organisation, you now need to ask a few very practical questions. Who will teach most of the course? Is that provider registered with the Office for Students? If not, is it small enough or otherwise exempt? And is the course designated for support for your exact start date? **What it means in one line:** these regulations do not abolish postgraduate loans, and they do not ban franchised teaching. They tighten the rules in England so that, from 1 September 2028, larger unregistered franchised providers will no longer automatically sit inside the student finance system for postgraduate Master’s and doctoral courses.