THE Conservatives are out of power. But the private Regent College London is so Tory-run and Tory-connected that it gives us a good view of how Conservative education policy works even when the party is not in government.

According to a recent inspection, it works by underfunded teaching along with the staff encouraging rule-breaking to inflate poor grades.

Selva Pankaj is chairman and owner of Regent College London, which has 6,000 students studying subjects including business and law across multiple central and west London sites.

The college is a big money business: Regent College has an £87 million turnover and makes £6.4m annual profit. This gives Pankaj plenty of spare cash to spend on his Conservative friends: Tory MP and former education secretary Gavin Williamson moonlights from his job as an MP to work on the side as a £60,000 a year adviser for Regent College.

Former Tory minister James Wharton also works for Pankaj’s Regent College. This is especially significant because Wharton was also the first chair of the Office for Students (OfS), running it from 2021-2024.

The Tories claimed they created the OfS to improve university standards, but critics said they really wanted to use for  promoting right-wing politics in higher education, hence appointing a Tory minister to run it.

But Wharton’s involvement in Regent College shows he is not a man you can rely on to improve educational standards. Unlike MPs, lords don’t have to declare the size of their outside income, so we don’t know how much Regent College pays Wharton.

Pankaj has also given the Conservative Party around £900,000 since 2015 and donated to individual Tory MPs — the latest Register of MPs’ Interests shows shadow Home Office minister Katie Lam accepted £7,000 political support from Pankaj this February.

Lam is a Tory “rising star” because she has Reform-style politics, like her call last year to deport many settled migrants to make Britain more “culturally coherent.” She told Parliament that “across our society, we are witnessing a troubling disregard for not only law and order, but standards of behaviour.” But it looks like her worries over “culture” and “standards” don’t stop her taking money from a businessman whose firm breaks basic educational standards.

The OfS issued its latest damning report on Regent College this February. The report showed Regent College “breached conditions” over education quality.

The OfS has been investigating Regent College’s business degree courses since 2022. In 2024 the OfS reported “concerns” over bad teaching and poor staffing.

In a typical case, a tutor “limited themself to reading bullet points from PowerPoint slides and playing videos for the class to watch, without seeming to provide any explanation of the ideas and concepts addressed.”

The latest report shows the college was still breaching conditions, with too few staff teaching students in badly furnished rooms with a poorly stocked library. Students were “directed to use local public libraries” because “core reading materials” were “not available” in the college “digital library.”

Having long funded the Tory Party, whose austerity shrank public libraries, Pankaj’s business now tries to exploit them to make up for underinvestment by his college.

Most shockingly, the OfS found staff resorting to breaking the rules to inflate inevitably poor exam results. The OfS “found serious concerns with assessment practices” to increase grades. These included students being “frequently encouraged to submit full drafts of summative coursework for feedback prior to formal submissions,” a “prohibited” practice which “undermined the integrity and independence of student work.”

Students were also given “early access” to exam questions. Most shockingly, one tutor “directed students towards the use of artificial intelligence tools or essay mills” to get them through their modules.

Regent College charges home students £9,000 a year. Foreign students pay fees of £17,000 a year. These fees don’t seem to translate into properly stocking the library or hiring enough qualified staff.

Regent College relies on “partners,” the University of Greater Manchester and Buckinghamshire New University, to validate degrees.

Pankaj wants the college to become a university with full degree-awarding powers by 2030, an ambition which may explain his political funding. The OfS report suggests this should not happen.