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. Those with the earliest financial year ends between August 2019 and February 2020 as displayed in this release show data that relate to pre-pandemic activity. The bulk of providers however, had a financial year end of 31st July 2020.

There were fears of financial uncertainty from the pandemic arising from potential reduction of tuition fees, commercial income reduction from residences income, catering and other activities, impact on research activities due to closures and additional IT costs to support online teaching and teaching support. Although the more extreme fears proved misplaced in 2019/20, providers continue to face challenges and will be impacted by the financial consequences of the pandemic for a few years to come.

The publication date for this release has also been impacted by COVID-19. Previous issues of this release have been published earlier in the year, around late March/early April. As a result of the pandemic, providers’ audited accounts were not available to the usual timescales, and therefore a two-month extension to the data collection timescales was granted to all providers this year. This publication was compiled and released as soon as was possible from that point.

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 the Office for Students (OfS) has been collecting financial data from HE providers in England, including alternative providers (APs) for the first time. 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.