A practitioner's view of accreditation and licensing - built inside one of the world's oldest universities, and applied across five jurisdictions.
Marten Krijgsman advises education providers on the regulatory work that underpins institutional credibility: accreditation, licensing, and the compliance architecture required to operate across borders.
His practice is built on more than a decade at the University of Oxford, where he held successive roles across graduate admissions, research degree administration, and project work at the Oxford Internet Institute. That time, spent inside one of the world's most scrutinised universities, gave him a working familiarity with the particular balance regulated institutions hold: academic autonomy on one hand, external review and international expectation on the other. It is the same balance his clients now navigate, at earlier stages of their own institutional development.
Alongside his university work, he spent several years as a project management consultant in the pharmaceutical sector, leading enterprise architecture and quality assurance engagements for global companies on projects ranging from $80,000 to $3 million. The cross-sector experience - of rigorous regulatory environments outside higher education - shapes how he thinks about compliance architecture and organisational readiness.
He is Principal of Oxford Accreditation Consultants, through which all his client work runs. His longest-running engagement is with Woolf, an online education company, where he acts as their Director of Strategic Licensing and leads accreditation and licensing projects across the sector. Alongside that engagement, the practice advises other independent education providers seeking to make their certifications internationally recognisable - work that has taken him across the United Kingdom, the United States, the Netherlands and Flanders, Estonia, and Malta.
He holds a D.Phil. and an M.Phil. from the University of Oxford, where he was a Clarendon Scholar. His doctoral research, on group identity and ideology in ancient religious communities, trained him in the slow, evidentiary work that underpins any serious scholarly argument - a habit of mind he brings to the regulatory dossiers he now prepares.
He writes and advises with a clear bias: that recognition is earned through substance, and that the regulators worth engaging with are the ones who take that substance seriously.
To discuss an engagement, write to marten@oxfordac.org.