UCEN Manchester awarded Degree Awarding Powers to complete hat-trick of quality milestones

UCEN Manchester is excited to announce it has successfully secured Degree Awarding Powers (DAPs) from the Office for Students (OfS), enabling it to develop and validate its own degree programmes, starting with 20 courses across its creative and technical provision.

The achievement is the latest in a string of milestone achievements for UCEN Manchester which provide independent validation of the high standards of academic quality in its career focussed, technical and creative degree level programmes. This includes securing TEF Silver status in 2024 and a set of excellent NSS results in 2025 where its results beat a number of national benchmarks. 

UCEN Manchester’s DAPs will come into effect on 1 January 2026, with validated courses spanning:

• Arden School of Theatre
• Manchester Film School
• School of Art, Media & Make-up
• School of Computing & Cybersecurity
• School of Business & Law

Michael Walsh, Dean, UCEN Manchester, commented:

“Securing New Degree Awarding Powers is a significant landmark in our journey that validates  the quality of our courses and demonstrates our future ambitions.

“Coming on the back of our TEF Silver status and recent strong NSS performance it is a clear signal that we are delivering a distinctly different and high‑quality higher education experience.

“With DAPs we will have the flexibility required to quickly respond to feedback from industry and changes in the labour market to ensure that our courses enable students to develop the higher level creative and technical skills that will allow them to quickly progress into employment.

“This means that securing DAPs is not only a further indicator of confidence in the quality of our provision but also empowers us to deliver on our commitment to provide students with high-quality degree-level courses that lead directly into employment.”

Initially students will be able to enrol on seven UCEN Manchester-validated degrees starting in September 2026, with more courses to be launched in both 2027 and 2028.

Earlier this year UCEN Manchester announced its 2024–25 National Student Survey (NSS) outcomes, which showed strong improvement across all themes on its 2023-24 scores, with its results beating national benchmarks in six of the nine categories. The outcomes included particularly strong scores in Teaching and Learning, Assessment & Feedback and Student Voice.

This followed on from UCEN Manchester achieving ‘Silver’ overall under the new Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), recognising that its “student experience and student outcomes are typically very high quality”. 

The TEF is a national scheme run by the Office for Students (OfS) that aims to encourage higher education providers to improve and deliver excellence in the areas that students care about the most: teaching, learning and achieving positive outcomes from their studies.