This Statistical Bulletin is the annual first release of HESA student data. It covers higher education (HE) providers who submit a full Student record data return to HESA. This includes publicly funded higher education institutions (HEI) in the UK, the privately funded University of Buckingham, and HE level provision at further education (FE) colleges in Wales (accounting for 1,705 students in 2018/19).
Data on alternative providers (APs) have been added as a supplement to this release. APs are higher education providers who do not receive recurrent funding from the funding councils or other public bodies and who are not further education (FE) colleges. Eligible students can access loans and grants from the Student Loans Company (SLC) on specific courses, referred to as designated courses. This includes APs in England that have successfully completed the designation process (with the exception of The University of Buckingham which supplied data to the HESA student record) for the academic year 2018/19. It also includes, from 2016/17, student numbers from one AP in Scotland in this record.
From 2019/20, new registration categories exist where providers can choose to apply to register as approved (fee cap) or approved. This bulletin uses terminology consistent with the 2018/19 reporting year in which such categories did not exist. See section 90 of Securing student success: Regulatory framework for higher education in England published by the Office for Students for further information on this.
This bulletin also includes information from the HESA Aggregate offshore record and can be seen in figure 11. This separate record counts students studying wholly outside the UK who are either registered with the reporting HEI or who are studying for an award of the reporting HEI. APs do not submit an Aggregate offshore record.
Readers should be aware that data definitions sometimes change over time. This, and coverage changes can affect the validity of time series comparisons. Any significant changes have been explained in the definitions.
The student record quality report contains important information on uses and users of the data, the quality of the data and a summary of methods used to compile student data outputs.