What is the expenditure of HE providers?

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic was declared in March 2020, part way through the 2019/20 academic year. Depending (among other factors) on the financial year end of each provider, there may have been varying impacts of the pandemic on individual providers’ financial data for 2019/20 into 2021/22.

HESA has collected and published financial statements data and associated analysis for the UK HE sector for over twenty years. During this time, HE financial data was relatively homogeneous in many respects, with financial years naturally following the pattern of the academic year. Changes to the regulation of HE in England have seen a broadening and diversification of HE provider types, and consequently a re-evaluation of appropriate collection and publication strategies.

From 2018/19 onwards the Office for Students (OfS) collected data from English providers as part of its Annual Financial return. Note that the OfS do not collect data from further education colleges and sixth form colleges under the primary regulation of the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA). The data collected by the OfS has been ingested by HESA and integrated with the data for HE providers in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. All tables contain a filter to allow for analysis by month of financial year end.

Providers for 2015/16 and 2016/17 academic years are all reported assuming a financial year end date of 31 July. As such, these dates will not appear in the tables.

For 2020/21, the following providers have not yet been included as they have not yet finalised their data or their data was finalised after the cut off for publication: University of Buckingham.

For 2021/22: University of Buckingham, Heriot-Watt University, Raindance Educational Services Limited, Central School of Ballet Charitable Trust Limited(the), National Centre for Circus Arts, Coventry University, Inchbald School of Design, Lamda Limited, Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance, Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, Spurgeon's College, University of Northampton, The, University of Keele, The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of Chester, Leeds Conservatoire, The University of Law Limited, Multiverse Group Limited, Paris Dauphine International, New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering, University Centre Peterborough.

Data for these providers will be included in a future update to this release.

In 2021/22 some providers included an accounting cost relating to pension provisions following periodic pension valuations. This adjustment is shown in the staff cost totals within tables 1, 8 and 12. Note that this cost is not reflective of the pure underlying financial performance of these institutions for this year.