If you have been keeping track of the redundancy announcements that have been the backdrop to the last few years in UK higher education chances are you have Queen Mary UCU’s “HE shrinking” page bookmarked.
Since at least 2023 this branch of the union has been keeping records of announcements and internal communications – and necessarily it is in the form of a narrative rather than reusable data.
I say “necessarily” because the announcement is just the start of a conversation. The provider wants (needs) to save money, and has decided that a lower staff headcount is the way – the union, departments, faculties, and students have alternative views. This seemingly hopeless situation can often resolve in ways where everyone is unhappy, but less unhappy than the initial announcement would suggest.
For this reason, the “hard” numbers (there are limitations, which we will get to) released as HESA Staff open data represent the middle-to-end of ongoing discussions, and a straight comparison between the numbers initially announced and the changes experienced in a provider (and documented in the HESA return) doesn’t always hold.
Staff overall
The big limitation is that – in England, and Northern Ireland – it is not mandatory to return data about staff that are not on academic contracts. This severely limits our overall understanding of what is happening with staff at providers in these countries – and happily from 2029 non-academic contract data for the whole UK will return to the collection.
In the meantime, the majority of visualisations in this article default (or are pre-set) to look at academic (non-atypical) contracts. In this context “atypical” refers to staff who are not permanent, work for less than four consecutive weeks and/or on one-off and short term tasks, and generally experience a high degree of flexibility. These are generally not teaching staff – common examples include student demonstrators, conference catering, and such like.
It is also worth noting that atypical staff are not necessarily zero-hours contracts (though clearly they may be given the need to work for less than four consecutive weeks). In the non-atypical world HESA has information about 3,440 individuals on an academic zero hours contract in 2024–25: the majority (3,180 are hourly paid). These numbers are down slightly on last year, and on the previous year.
Overall, there were 244,755 academic non-atypical full person equivalent staff in 2024–25 – including 161,225 full-time and the equivalent of 83,525 as part time roles. The full -time number is up on last year (and is the highest on record), whereas both part time and overall numbers have fallen.
By default this chart shows you the whole sector, but you can use the “provider” filter to choose an institution of interest. You can always analyse these numbers by academic employment function (teaching, research, and so on), contract level (professors), terms of employment (open-ended or fixed term), source of basic salary, and sex.
On those points, it is notable that the proportion of academic staff on teaching and research contracts is up slightly on recent years at 43.16 per cent, which remains far below the nearly half that was standard a decade ago. Teaching only contracts are down on the last couple of years at 34.8 per cent. The proportion of staff on an open-ended or permanent contract is – at 71.45 per cent – the highest in a decade.
Age and pay
We can see the age of academic non-atypical staff by age (note this is FPE rather than FTE so overall numbers may look a little different) split by cost centres. While we may be more familiar with the CAH and HECoS subject categories, in staff (and finance) data we are trying to associate data with physical bits of the university.
This view defaults to “all academic cost centres” – in other words all named subject areas. There are of course many people on academic contracts that work in central departments (senior managers are the obvious example) which it makes sense to me to exclude here. The sense that the shape of the chart overall gives me is one of an aging academic population: from nearly a third of academic staff being under 35 a decade ago we now have just over a quarter in that age bracket.
Clearly there are differences by subject areas: scientists tend to be younger, while academics in the humanities tend to be older. You can explore cost centres at a wider group level, or drill down to individual cost centres.
HESA also gives us data on pay we can filter by age (and this time, provider rather than cost centre). As usual this is expressed in bands linked to the single pay scale: and as usual I have translated these to show the spine points changing proportion year on year (the salaries themselves are visible on the tooltips).
The first thing you are going to want to do here is look at salaries at your own institution – you can also filter by contract level (professors), job function (teaching or research) and age. I will note on a sector level that proportionally more staff are in the higher two salary bands (spine point 40 and above) than last year, but proportions are not substantially different from previous years. Some 510 non-atypical academic staff are currently on a spine point below 20 – equivalent to a salary below £29,659. Twenty are on a salary below £23,581, which is below the 2025 minimum wage and very likely to be a data error.
I should note that with very low numbers we run into the “HESA rounds everything by five” issue. This is done for noble reasons (to avoid identifying individual staff) but has the side effect of making it very difficult to be certain about the size of small populations.
Starters and leavers
The non-atypical academic staff (FPE) count of the sector has fallen by 2,175 over last year – but the full-time population has risen by just under 1,300. As such the majority of the first drop in academic staff numbers for more than a decade is caused by a loss of part time roles.
There were, overall, 43,050 members of staff who left an academic role in a UK higher education provider, and 40,775 that started a new role. Some of these – as we shall see – are likely to be the same people.
Other than the link to immediate financial concern during the 2024–25 academic year there is not a lot to separate out providers that grew staff numbers from those that cut back. The need to drive efficiencies with redundancy and cuts is no respecter of institutional age and status: likewise there is no sure-fire recipe for growth (though larger Russell Group providers are doing a lot of growing.)
We can also look at (FTE) growth within providers and cost centres – the filter is at the top left and we once again default to academic atypical: you can use the controls at the bottom to zero into the area of an institution you are interested in.
What strikes me here is that the sciences have held up comparatively well, while humanities, arts, and social sciences have seen cuts – though honestly the difference is less stark than you may expect.
Here’s another view of the same data allowing you to compare 2023–24 and 2024–25 directly: this is probably an easier way to see recent history. Again, select a provider (or “total” for overall) at the top, and switch between cost centre or cost centre group on the left.
Remember above we hinted that some people who left academic roles in UK higher education moved to other academic roles in higher education? This plot (non-atypical academic FTE) shows where staff have come from and moved to in terms of employment.
We learn that 4,590 staff left an academic role in the sector for another one during 2024–25: that’s not as many as the post-pandemic peak but in line with historic norms. In the same year 7,930 staff joined a UK higher education provider from another, a historic low – the two numbers are not equivalent because of the time taken to recruit staff and the nature of in-year movement.
You can filter by age, mode of employment, and academic contract type (teaching, research) – all the data is sector level only. It is notable that mid-career staff tend to be those who move within the sector, and that staff of all ages (3,600 of them) can find themselves outside of regular employment after leaving a higher education provider.
In the HESA press release, we have “There were 244,755 academic staff (excluding atypical) employed in the HE sector. This represented a decrease of 1% compared with 246,930 on 1 December 2023, marking a break in the upward trend observed since 2014/15.” https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/19-02-2026/sb274-higher-education-staff-statistics But above we have “Overall, there were 490,510 academic non-atypical full time equivalent staff in 2024–25 – including 322,445 full time and the equivalent of 167,050 as part time roles. The full time number is up on last year (and is the highest on record), whereas both part time and overall numbers have fallen.” Is there a… Read more »
Hi Ian, it looks like David’s first chart above has included both the granular and “ALL” Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) values from https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/staff/table-7, in effect representing each staff member twice, once in the total and once per SOC. The figures in the quote paragraph appear to come from this chart and other charts indicate a staffing count closer to the HESA-quoted figures.
That said, I’m very impressed by David’s analysis, and the speed at which it is produced.
Thanks Simon and well spotted. I have fixed the chart (you have a new filter to play with too) and the text.
The online student publication The Tab is also documenting redundancies by extracting information from university accounts. The latest year for the HESA data is 2024/25, university accounts could be published later. It is unclear exactly what is occurring at each provider, but providers have reached an inflection point, where after many years of growth, the trend in staff numbers is now downwards. We are likely to see many more redundancies year on year, as the effect of the cap on international student visas accuumulates and cost pressures continue along other changes. Comparisons and patterns are meaningful if we want to… Read more »
Surely just a standard ‘boom and bust’ cycle? – with potentially yet more ‘bust’ to come as the decline in IS recruitment bites deeper AND then by the 2030s we get demographic decline in the core customer numbers? Recall the ‘Tunnelling through the Hump’ debate about HE numbers way back around 1980… we have been here before but this time there are not the positives of discovering the milch-cow of IS fees and also the unmet demand from mature students (nor indeed the use of the USS pension scheme to subsidise redundancy packages, and of course now Us carry far… Read more »