The move to increase university tuition fees in England to £9,250 has been launched - without any announcement from the Department for Education.
The changes to the fees, affecting more than 500,000 students beginning in the autumn, was put onto a government website last week.
Opposition parties have called it "shabby" and "avoiding scrutiny".
The Department for Education has rejected suggestions it wanted to deflect attention from the increase.
Tuition fees in England have been fixed at £9,000 since 2012 - but the government wants to allow fees to increase each year with inflation, with an initial increase to £9,250 from the autumn.
MPs wanting to scrutinise the plans had been waiting for the government to publish its bid to increase fees.
But it has emerged in December that the regulations to enable the higher fees were published last Thursday without being announced on the Department for Education's website.
Instead the regulations were placed on a government website managed by the National Archives, http://www.legislation.gov.uk, on the day school league tables were published.
Labour's Gordon Marsden accused the government of trying to "sneak out" the changes - saying that this is the "increase that doesn't like to speak its name".
