The new Higher Education Students Early Statistics (HESES) data – our first look at 2025-26 student numbers – represents the first stage in what will almost certainly end up as a full, root-and-branch, reform of the subject element of the strategic priority grant (SPG).

The SPG is the vestigial emanation of the old HEFCE funding method, and a system that allocates funding based on the “cost” of delivering tuition in a particular subject (based on Subject-FACTS calculations derived from the TRAC data collection process, if you want to be precise about it!). HESES represents the other major input to these calculations – the number of fundable students in each subject price group.

Successive secretaries of state have each taken their turn to make tweaks to this decades-old approach – largely by adding additional price groups to separate out subjects that have fallen from favour – but we are long overdue a more radical rethink, and we first got hint of this when the HESES guidance told us that:

more granular subject data is required to support ongoing work reviewing the allocation of OfS funding so this can best support the Government’s long-term ambitions on growth and opportunity, and to support future skills needs.

The 2025-26 release, as well as constituting our first look at current student numbers, presents a breakdown into 65 subject groups within the existing seven price groups. This will allow the data team at OfS to model the impact of various subject-specific approaches to SPG funding. Overall, there were 2.3m students across undergraduate and postgraduate taught provision in England, including just over a million new entrants.

It looks pleasingly clean, but under the bonnet the usual mess persists. The standard HESA methodology for assigning a student to a subject area takes into account the actual modules a student studies (and the proportions related to a specific subject), whereas this HESES method is focused primarily on the name of the qualification aim (and we are told explicitly that the subject coding “ should not be derived from a detailed analysis of the contributions of subjects to individual students’ programmes of study… they must instead be based on a broad assessment of the relative contributions of each subject”).

With OfS collecting data at many different levels of the CAH hierarchy this has been an absolute delight for student record officers to pull together, and I’m sure the entreaties towards what I’m going to call “vibe subject coding” were very welcome.

Here’s a by provider look at tables 1 and 2. We have filters for provider, population (allowing you to see just 2025-26 entrants or all students), mode of study, and level of study – and I’ve included a way to examine just one price group for ease of reading.

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You may be wondering, given that OfS will not be funding subcontractual provision in future, where that data is. For the chart above, the information is perhaps unhelpfully folded in to the wider “non-fundable” bucket, but I was momentarily excited to see it as a discrete field in table 4 (there is no table 3, don’t ask).

Table four covers provision leading to healthcare related professions – and rather than another chart I’m just going to tell you that there are 80 undergraduate “dental therapies” associated students on a subcontractually delivered course associated with the University of Birmingham and delivered by the Birmingham Community Healthcare Foundation, and 125 adult nursing students on a subcontractually delivered course associated with the University of Lancashire (most likely delivered by the Lancashire Teaching Hospital Trust). And that, apparently is it