We didn’t even need the interminable Parliamentary debates on the methodological validity of TEF to know that, in modern higher education, data is everything. Most importantly, data is also political – how it is collected, how it is arranged, how it is analysed, benchmarked, and publicised.
This leaves Paul Clark and the Higher Education Statistics Agency in a place of growing influence. When the experimental LEO data was released by DfE last December, Clark was the only person outside of the department on the pre-release list. The past year has seen HESA flexing its data muscles in many ways: designing a new graduate outcomes survey, releasing new data on alternative providers, providing the benchmarking methods for TEF, releasing a new website and app, and overseeing a new method of subject coding. And with the news media increasingly interested in and utilising the rich array of data available about universities, HESA’s role in curating and publishing universities’ information is only growing in importance.