News and insight

The Higher Education Commission’s (HEC) report ‘From Bricks to Clicks: the potential of data and analytics in Higher Education’, published today (Friday 22 January 2016), contains the findings of the Commission’s ten-month inquiry into the transformative effect that data and analytics can have for university students, higher education providers and the HE sector as a whole.

This is the first release of data from the 2014/15 HESA Staff record. The release provides details of staff employment at UK Higher Education providers (HEPs) on 1 December 2014. It has been produced in partnership with the UK administrations and is released in accordance with the arrangements approved by the UK Statistics Authority.

We have responded to the Government's Higher Education Green Paper 'Fulfilling our potential: teaching excellence, social mobility, and student choice'.

We believe that the Green Paper is an important set of proposals, outlining changes required to build on the original reforms set out in the White Paper on higher education in 2011, putting students at the heart of the system.

This Statistical First Release (SFR) has been produced by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) in collaboration with statisticians from the UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), the Welsh Government (WG), the Scottish Government (SG) and the Department for Employment and Learning Northern Ireland (DEL(NI)). It has been released according to the arrangements approved by the UK Statistics Authority. It provides details of student enrolments and qualifications obtained by higher education (HE) students at HE providers in the United Kingdom (UK) for the academic year 2014/15.

Today, 30 November 2015, the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) launches Heidi Plus, the new business intelligence service for the UK Higher Education sector. Heidi Plus is the result of a joint project between us and Jisc to boost the business intelligence capability of UK HE providers. The service provides access to extensive data and the latest visualisation technology to promote efficient decision making in HE.

In 2013/14, there were 236,580 first year non-UK domiciled students studying at UK HE providers. Nearly a quarter of these students came from China (there was a 4.0% increase in the number of students from China in 2013/14 from 2012/13). The chart below shows the Top 20 countries of domicile in 2013/14 alongside a table showing the percentage change from 2012/13 to 2013/14. There was nearly a 20% increase in students from Italy in 2013/14 from 2012/13.

Cheltenham Literature Festival is an annual event celebrating the written word. As it is based in the same town as our offices, it seemed appropriate to delve into our data to learn about students, qualifiers and leavers who had 'Literature' in their course title during 2013/14.

The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) is today (Monday 28 September 2015) launching a consultation on its vision for a modernised and more efficient approach to UK HE data. The Data Futures consultation seeks the views of UK higher education providers on our plans to transform the collection, processing and analysis of data in the sector.

A sample of graduates who left higher education in 2010/11 were asked what they were doing on 24 November 2014.

The HESA publication Higher Education Statistics for the United Kingdom 2013/14 is released today. This National Statistics publication gives a statistical overview of UK higher education (HE) in the 2013/14 academic year including data from HESA and other statistics producers.