Losing pieces of HESES

The Higher Education Students Early Statistics are still used, in the absence of other timely in-year data, to dole out a hefty chunk of the nearly £1bn of public funds still allocated by the Office for Students. It informs the allocation of provision to subject-based price groups, and feeds into the allocation of supplementary funding used to encourage particular styles of provision.

It’s a pretty open secret that we are looking down the barrel of a fairly major rethink of the allocation of OfS funding – and an early warning of big changes for this year’s collection (used to calculate the 2026-27 allocations) underline just how big a shift could be on the cards.

Veterans of this return will immediately by just how radical this is – the disaggregation of student numbers into two columns (inventively named “column 1” and “column 2) based on whether or not they start their course before or after the census data is no more, there’s no need to return data on student domicile, there are only two levels of study (UG or PGT) returned, and information on longer-than-standard academic years or study abroad is no longer required.

That’s a lot – but as the publication notes:

The most significant change for providers is that we will not collect data at the price-group level used in previous collections

Instead, you’ll be mapping students to 58 subject groups, using the seldom-seen Common Academic Hierarchy level 2 groupings. There’s a mapping between HECoS granular subjects CAH2, and price groups at Annex B. And you will spot a new price group in there: C1.3 collects up the information, media, and journalism related provision that will no longer be eligible for high cost funding in future.

The disaggregation of subject data will also, in a form of words that is becoming familiar:

support ongoing work to review the allocation of OfS funding so this can best support the government’s long-term ambitions on growth and opportunity, to support future skills needs and the Industrial Strategy

Keep an eye out in the White Paper, I will be.

But if you run this collection at a provider, that aspect is perhaps of less immediate concern than just how much of a pain correctly allocating students will end up being. You “may require providers to make some changes to how your student records systems output HESA data” which sounds like a fun job for a quiet afternoon. And it isn’t pure CAH2 either – you’ll return, for example, some geography, environmental, and earth sciences subjects as “CAH 26-01 (price group C2)” and others as “CAH-26-01 (price group B)”. It really does combine the arbitrary nature of the price groups with the additional workload of CAH2 in an impressive way.

And over in the medical and dental survey (MDS) you’ll now (in England at least), be returning “exempt” student numbers: international students who don’t get access to home funding, and degree apprentices.

Just to complete your Wednesday lunchbreak, the OfS will again be calculating multipliers, and the representation process remains the same as this year.

There’s always room to streamline regulatory data submissions – but each laudable attempt to remove burden is generally accompanied by the addition of more, unexpected, work elsewhere. And this is very much what has happened here.