When Welsh higher education minister Vikki Howells makes a written statement in the Senedd, she has a habit of including all kinds of other intriguing details beyond the headline. And, as Wonkhe Daily readers will be aware – there’s often things of interest for those more used to following Westminster than Wales.

One of the pieces of work Howells hinted at yesterday – in a statement ostensibly about a little bit of extra capital funding – was a Medr “overview of subject demand, provision, and distribution” that would allow the newish regulator to:

“consider where interventions might be required to ensure the continuation of strategically important subject areas in Wales that are vital to the success of public services

This kind of work a valuable perspective on higher education and, where we are allocating increasingly scarce additional government funding, one that you would expect regulators to be particularly concerned about (the best the Office for Students currently offers – I knew you’d ask – is the utterly mystifying Key Performance Indicator number 8).

There’s a peculiar reluctance for our providers of official statistics to get involved in what is taught where, which is why an update to the British Academy “Mapping SHAPE provision” work is so welcome. The first version of these dashboards allowed you to take a view of the number of first-year first degree UK-domiciled students below the age of 20 studying in various parts of the UK, the update allows you to look at the changes in student numbers at individual providers over 11 years between 2011-12 and 2022-23 – and all for any subject within the broad SHAPE (social sciences, humanities, and arts for people and the economy).

It’s a commendable job – subject and geographic mapping is particularly tricky due to changes in definitions. Most notably the shift between two approaches to subject area coding (JACS to the far superior CAH/HECoS) in 2017, but there are other remappings (criminology moved from anthropology to sociology, for example) that have required the British Academy team to come up with a custom mapping to allow multi-year comparisons.

The tool also allows you to exclude joint honours provision (defined as where a full-time student is less than full-time in one subject area), and to filter out provision where tariffs are above average. I know subject associations and advocacy groups are already making use of this tool– with the current round of university cuts I can imagine trade unions and campaigners will be looking at today’s release with interest. The team is the first to admit that the data isn’t perfect (how could it be?) but the map, exemplary caveats, and underlying analysis represent the very best that is currently available.

And this is a problem. If we are serious about positioning higher education at the intersection of place and social mobility, about meeting student and employer demands right across the country, it should be far easier to take this kind of overview. It should be something regulators are serious about – especially as we move closer to the need for specific engagement to save provision in niche subject areas.

And the geographic extent of the subject offer is as important as where students are currently studying – we need to be able to track where institutions themselves are unilateral spotting and responding to evidence of demand, and where this has and has not worked in the past. Data like this is collected, it just isn’t published or used.

Here’s my go at using UCAS End of Cycle data to do something similar (for UK domiciled acceptances and applications from those aged 20 and under). We’re limited to a very high level group of subject areas, and can only go back to 2017 and the onset of HECoS/CAH. Ideally more detail would be available as a means of supporting subject plurality, spread, and responsive attraction – but we are where we are.

[Full screen]