How did BPP University become a £2.5 billion behemoth?

The price tag placed on one of the UK’s largest private universities as it prepares to go back up for sale this autumn has raised some eyebrows.

At £2.5 billion, BPP Education Group – which includes BPP University and a wider apprenticeship and professional training offer – will cost any potential suitor more than triple the £700 million its current owner, TDR Capital, paid just three years ago.

While insiders said the price was reflective of a spike in appetite to invest in private higher education, the group remains a rarity in the UK system: one of only three for-profit providers operating at the same scale as a traditional public university, along with the University of Law and Arden University.

Its development has run in parallel to the country’s changing regulatory environment, with BPP among the first of its kind to secure trappings such as a university title and taught degree-awarding powers, although it has fared less well in new initiatives such as the Teaching Excellence Framework.

Those involved in building up the company attributed its success to its relentless focus on industry partnerships, graduate employability and international students, a long time before the rest of the sector caught up.

“It was my complete annoyance that everybody kept moving into my territory,” said Carl Lygo, the founding vice-chancellor of BPP University who now runs Arden. “Talking about employment, talking about employers, doing bespoke programmes. All of that we were doing in the 1990s and 2000s before it became super-popular, and the government of the day started pushing a similar approach.”

Named after the surnames of its three founders – Alan Brierley, Richard Price and Charles Prior – BPP initially found success as a training college for accountants, but it was the development of its law school that drove its expansion.

In what was seen as a big turning point in the mid-2000s, the then fledgling school worked with some of the UK’s leading law firms to revamp the Legal Practice Course (LPC) that was widely seen as being no longer fit for purpose, eventually securing exclusivity deals to teach the trainees of some 60 companies.

This fuelled expansion across the UK – with study centres opened in major cities including Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham and Bristol – and attracted a boom in overseas enrolments.

“We were constantly developing links with decision-makers in law firms,” said Professor Lygo. “Listening to concerns about current provision, designing things that met those issues and then playing it back to them. It took a few years to gain their trust and convince them that we could do it – a big investment in people, time and eventually real estate.”

The law school also drove the institution to jump through the regulatory hoops after it failed to find a university partner to run a master’s degree programme and decided instead to go it alone, eventually being granted indefinite taught degree-awarding powers in 2020.

In more recent years however, law has become less of a focus for BPP. It closed its undergraduate programme in 2018 in part due to wholesale changes to legal education, with the introduction of the Solicitors Qualifying Exam that will eventually replace the LPC, a move that many believe will fuel competition in the market.

Accounts for the university part of the business for the year ending August 2023 show an increased turnover of £67.3 million, attributed primarily to growth in enrolments in its other schools: business and nursing. In the wider BPP group, apprenticeship provision and the selling of study materials worldwide have proven key growth areas.

Brooke Storer-Church, the chief executive of mission group GuildHE – which counts BPP as one of its members – said it had shown the value of vocational, technical and professionally led programmes and the “diversity and strength that this brings to the UK higher education sector offer”.

But the success of BPP as a private provider remains an exception in the UK sector, said Chris Millward, a former director of fair access and participation at the English regulator, the Office for Students, who added that most other private providers continue to operate at a very small scale, with the majority having fewer than 1,000 students.

BPP already had the size and brand to manage the regulatory requirements, but many other private providers would see the level of investment needed as off-putting, said Professor Millward, now professor of practice in education policy at the University of Birmingham.

And while the likes of BPP may have influenced the behaviour of university departments that offer similar subjects, the idea that growth in private provision would drive innovation and efficiency across the whole sector – a key tenet of the 2017 Higher Education and Research Act – had not proven to be the case.

This, according to Professor Millward, raised questions about how much regulatory resource should continue to be dedicated to developing private provision.

tom.williams@timeshighereducation.com