News and insight

The first release of staff data for the academic year 2015/16 shows that 410,130 staff were employed in the HE sector of whom 201,380 (49%) were academic staff. 17% of academic staff were EU nationals and 12% had a non-EU nationality. 24% of professors were female.

  Open data licence: CC-BY-4.0

Facilitating the effective transition of students into the labour market is one of the top policy priorities in higher education at the moment. To support this, we are currently spearheading a major review of the data we collect around graduate destinations – the NewDLHE review.

Local skills, enterprise and services strategies are high on the agendas of local planners and HE decision-makers. Understanding the migration of students and graduates into and out of a geographical area plays a big part. The interactive charts in this blogpost offer valuable regional insights. See what’s happening in your region and benchmark this against other UK regions.

The first release of student data for the academic year 2015/16 shows that 2,280,830 students were enrolled at HE providers in 2015/16, an increase of 0.7% on last year's figure. The number of first year students from outside the EU fell for the second year in a row. 742,730 HE qualifications were awarded and 24% of first degree graduates gained a first class honours classification.

  Open data licence: CC-BY-4.0

Collection Design Project version 2: a massive thank you to everyone who has submitted responses to this stage of the consultation.

Today we publish our summary report of responses from our first consultation on open data. It’s been extremely helpful for us to be able to obtain the views of a wide range of our data suppliers, data users and open data advocates from across the HE sector and further afield.

I have spent much of the past year speaking with HE providers about the Data Futures programme. The question I get asked more than any other is ‘are you speaking to the software suppliers?’

What’s next for NewDLHE? Back in September, we published the high-level consultation responses, and between us we have now officially read every response to every question – an impressive feat with 200+ responses to 128 questions. We’ve been using your detailed feedback to create the survey design for the replacement to DLHE.

Response to questions and feedback submitted as part of the Collection Design Project version 2 design phase.

We welcome the publication by the Council for Science and Technology (CST) of their letter, Strengthening entrepreneurship education to boost growth, jobs and productivity. Their recommendations tally with work we are already engaged in to improve data about entrepreneurial education.