Higher Education Staff Data 2022/23

New open data shows the age and nationality profiles of academic departments.

View Higher Education Staff Data

Open data released today shows demographic and contractual information about academic staff at UK higher education providers in the 2022/23 academic year.

Broken down by cost centre, a proxy for academic departments, the data shows the differing age profiles of academic staff by discipline. Science and engineering cost centres have the highest proportion of academic staff aged 40 or under. Chemistry and chemical engineering in particular saw 60% of their academic staff below this age. Education and continuing education showed the oldest age profile with only 25% and 24% of academic staff in these cost centres aged 40 or younger¹.

The nationality of staff also differed between cost centres with over 55% of academic staff in economics and chemical engineering having non-UK nationality. Nursing and sports science had the lowest proportions of non-UK nationality academic staff at below 15%².

HE provider breakdowns in today’s release include data on the qualifications held by academic staff. 56% of academic staff held a doctorate in 2022/23 with this proportion ranging from 0% to 100%³ among HE providers. Among academic staff employed on teaching contracts, 67% held a teaching qualification with this proportion also ranging from 0% to 100% ⁴.

2022/23 was the fifth year for which demographic data was collected about governors of HE providers in England, Wales and Scotland. Since this data was first collected in 2018/19 the proportion of Black governors across the three nations has risen from 3% to 5% and the proportion of Asian governors has risen from 5% to 9%. The proportion of governors who are women has risen from 42% to 43% over the five years⁵.

Today’s official statistics release Higher Education Staff Data includes detailed staff data across five topics:

• Who’s working in HE? 
• What areas do they work in? 
• What are their employment conditions? 
• What are their salaries?
• Where do they work, come from, and go to?

Most data tables include nine years of data, with older data available through HESA’s publications archive.

Notes

1. See Table 21
2. See Table 26
3. See Table 8
4. See Table 10
5. See Table 25
6. Headline statistics in this press release exclude ‘atypical’ staff. Atypical contracts are generally non-permanent contracts for short, one-off, or as-and-when tasks. Atypical staff figures are counted differently and shown separately and should not be added to non-atypical figures. See the Terms of employment definition for more detail.  
7. Statistics in this press release relate to staff employed at UK higher education providers on 1 December 2022 in the academic year running from 1 August 2022 to 31 July 2023.
8. Percentages exclude unknown values.  
9. See Definitions: Staff for definitions of terms used in the release and explanation of the coverage of statistics. 
10. See Upcoming data releases for a schedule of HESA Official Statistics releases. 
11. HESA is part of Jisc. Jisc is the data controller of personal data previously controlled by HESA. Privacy information on the HESA website has been updated.
12. Jisc cannot accept responsibility for any inferences or conclusions derived from the data by third parties.