It established the Hebdomadal Council, the leading body in the university's administration, stating that most members of full-time academic staff were to have voting rights over it.

[5] It established the Hebdomadal Council as the university's governing body; appointed Commissioners to deal with emoluments and variations in historic endowments; and opened the university to students outside the Church of England, as there was no longer a requirement to undergo a theological test or take the Oath of Supremacy.

[6] The subject of dropping the theological Test was not new as James Heywood described in the parliamentary debate: "The subject was not a new one, for it had been brought before Parliament in 1772, when a petition was presented from a large number of clergymen on the subject of an alteration in clerical oaths, and in 1834 the late Mr. Alderman Wood brought in a Bill for the abolition of matriculation and degree oaths in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which passed this House by a large majority, but was lost in the other House.

He thought he was justified in saying that there was nothing to be expected from the University itself on this subject, nor from the operation of a mere enabling Bill.

Such an alteration as he now proposed was not one which could be expected to be made by an exclusively clerical body such as the University of Oxford; and he thought it was a question with which it was particularly the province of Parliament to deal.