Key Financial Indicators (KFIs)

HE Provider Data: Finance Key Financial Indicators

25 April 2023

KFIs are a set of ratio calculations based on data from the Finance record.

The impact of COVID-19 on the finance release:
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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.

Changes to finance data from 2018/19
Changes to regulation mean that the finance data from 2018/19 onwards differs in several respects from previous years' data. Expand this box for more information.

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.

Why are some providers missing from the 2020/21 and 2021/22 data?
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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.

KFIs are not performance indicators and take no account of higher education provider characteristics such as the range of subjects taught or the types of provision.

For descriptions of each indicator see: Key Financial Indicator (KFI) definitions.

Providers in 2015/16 and 2016/17 were not required to report financial year end dates, these dates will not appear in the tables. From 2017/18, where a provider has changed its financial year end, it can mean that it appears twice or not at all within certain academic years. Where applicable, table grand totals will contain all provider values for the academic year.

Some HE providers saw significant cost adjustments in both 2018/19 and 2019/20, relating to the accounting treatment for the value of pension schemes. This appears as a significant additional cost in 2018/19, which caused some providers to report deficits, and an opposite movement in 2019/20, which caused some providers to show unusually large surpluses. This additional cost is an accounting, non-cash, adjustment. It is not a typical annual operating expense/credit for these providers and therefore caution is advised in any interpretation of financial operating performance in 2018/19 and 2019/20. For this reason, additional versions of relevant KFIs with pension cost adjustments applied have been published to enable users to understand the impact of this accounting change.