Other financial statements: Senior staff pay

HE Provider Data: Finance Other financial statements

30 November 2023

On this page: Head of provider remuneration | Analysis of staff costs | Severance payments

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 2020/21.

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 2021/22 and 2022/23 data?
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For 2021/22, the following provider has not yet been included as their data was finalised after the cut off for publication: University of Northampton.

Data for this provider will be published in spring 2024.

Data for 2022/23 is only displayed for a small number of English providers whose financial year-end dates were between August and December 2022. 2022/23 data for the remainder of providers will be published in spring 2024. To see the latest available data for other providers please select 2021/22 from the Academic year filter.

Staff costs increase in 2021/22
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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.

Accounts directions from the Office for Students (PDF), the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales, the Scottish Funding Council (PDF) and the Department for the Economy (NI) (PDF) require HE providers to publish details of senior staff pay as part of their annual statements. This information was included in the HESA Finance record for the first time in 2017/18.

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.

Head of provider remuneration

This table shows the salary and benefits paid to the heads of provider in each year. Total remuneration is shown as the sum of salary and all benefits. Where the head of provider has changed during the year there is a total remuneration figure for each head that was in post during that year.

Table 11 - Head of provider remuneration

Academic years 2016/17 to 2022/23

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Analysis of staff costs

This table shows staff costs broken down by salary, pension, and other costs. Data on the remuneration of higher paid staff records the number of staff paid over £100,000 p.a. during the reporting year.

This information is collected differently for the different UK administrations: Data is not required by the funding and regulatory bodies in Scotland and is therefore not collected by HESA. Data for England is returned as full-time equivalent (FTE). Data for Wales and Northern Ireland is returned as a headcount of staff. HE providers are required to submit data in salary bands, but this data is aggregated in HESA published statistics to reduce the risk of identifying individual personal data.

For the academic years 2016/17 – 2021/22 some inconsistencies are apparent among non-English HE providers in the total staff costs displayed in Table 12 of the open data when comparing against staff costs reported in Table 1. These discrepancies relate to differences in the way that HE providers have reported staff costs in both tables – in some cases excluding non-academic staff costs, and in some cases including pension adjusted costs. Staff costs in Table 1 are validated against providers’ published accounts.

Table 12 - Analysis of staff costs

Academic years 2016/17 to 2022/23

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Severance payments

This table shows the total amounts paid in compensation for loss of office, and the number of people to whom this was paid. Where compensation for loss of office is paid to the head of provider this is shown separately.

For HE providers in England data for the whole provider includes the head of provider. For HE providers in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland compensation payments are only shown for staff earning over £100,000 p.a., but exclude the head of provider.

Table 13 - Severance payments by HE provider and academic year

Academic years 2016/17 to 2022/23

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