Right, so remember how we got rid of the idea of providers returning funding completion status (FUNDCOMP) back in July 2023? Of course you do – it was clearly the story of the summer, massively overshadowing the resignation of Boris Johnson.

This was all made possible via the possibilities offered by Data Futures – the idea was that getting providers to return two different sets of data on students with different definitions in quick succession was a silly one and a little bit of data magic could ease burden on providers. For this reason, HESES columns 3, 4, and 4a perished. In this transitional year, however, this would mean we would suffer from an absence of student FTE data (including non-completion forecasts).

The plan, therefore, was to derive these figures from the previous (HESES22) year of data. This would be done by a set of multipliers applied to the new (HESES23) figures based on the way things looked in the old (HESES22) figures. With student numbers and attrition rates unlikely to change much in the course of a single academic year, the day was saved.

A multiplier? So, funding allocated by OfS differs based on:

• The level of study (undergraduate and postgraduate provision of various sorts)
• The mode of study (full time, part time, sandwich year)
• The subject area (via a system of price groups, and also specific allocations based on medical and related professions)
• The length of the academic year (standard, or long)

And also takes into account

• Funding completion (basically how many FTE students that started a funded year of study would complete it)

We know all the information in the top list based on HESES23 data, and we have an idea about the likely completion rates (which were, lest we forget, projections) from the HESES22 data. So for each possible category of fundable student, OfS have taken years of engagement from this year’s HESES and made assumptions about what the fundable FTE would be based on current mode and historic projected funded non-completion. This would generally be your own HESES22 data used to make the derivation, unless you didn’t have enough of it in which cases aggregations have been used.

To be honest this was a fudge even in a good year. It has not been a good year.

For what must be the fourth or fifth year in a row, this year has turned out to be one of change and strife in higher education – and therefore assumptions many not hold from last year. So today OfS is offering providers the opportunity to see their calculated multipliers and provide evidence to challenge them should circumstances had changed. For those keeping up at the back, the process of each individual provider recalculating these multipliers to check them is in no way at all more burdensome than just making the usual HESES return.

How would you check whether these assumptions mesh with reality? Well, your HESA Student submission might help – but with this having been delayed, and issues with the platform playing havoc with data quality (and, frankly, staff burnout and attrition), not quite so easy.

If you’ve ever laboured under the impression that we somehow know, as a nation, how many students there are or what they are studying – and that funding was allocated based on this information – I can only offer my apology.