Who's working in HE?

Academic staff contracts are for planning, directing and undertaking academic teaching and research. This includes lecturers and researchers, but also Vice chancellors, and medical professionals who undertake research.

Non-academic staff contracts include managers, professionals in non-academic jobs, student welfare workers, secretaries, caretakers and cleaners. From 2019/20, it became optional for providers in England and Northern Ireland to return non-academic staff data (with the exception of any non-academic contracts held by vice-chancellors/heads of institutions or governors).

See the Academic employment marker definition for more detail.

Higher Education Providers send data to HESA about all their staff who are employed under a contract of employment at any time during the academic year (1 August to 31 July). To prevent over-counting of staff resource HESA only publishes data about staff employed on an active contract on a single reference date of 1 December.

Exceptions to the 1 December census date rule are staff on atypical contracts who are counted regardless of their start and finish dates. Atypical staff figures are always shown separately and should not be added to non-atypical figures.

Most counts of staff numbers are full-person equivalent. This means that a staff member with more than one contract or activity is divided between those activities in the data tables. For example someone who works 3 days a week as a professor and 1 day a week as a gardener will be counted as 0.75 professors and 0.25 gardeners.

See the definitions for Coverage and Staff full-person equivalent for more detail.

There are notable changes to the coverage of Staff data from 2019/20. Prior to 2019/20, the data covered all publicly funded HE providers in the UK (and the University of Buckingham). From 2019/20, the data covers providers registered with the Office for Students’ (OfS) in the approved (fee cap) category alongside all publicly funded HE providers in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. This represents a slightly higher number of providers falling within coverage this year.