Strategic priorities from HESA BCI

This morning's HESA BCI release offers a surprisingly deep examination of provider strategic priorities.

David Kernohan is Deputy Editor of Wonkhe

Though it underpins KEF, and speaks increasingly to sector positions and government priorities around place, it’s not a dataset that sees a lot of analytic action. I’m looking here particularly at the “strategies, approaches, and infrastructure” section – which represents a set of survey responses about provider activities and priorities.

It’s genuinely fascinating stuff. Here, for instance, is a chart by mission group of providers who see “widening access” as one of three key economic contributions:

[Full screen]

Hardly any Russell Group providers see this as a key economic contribution (which is not to say that they’re not doing it, of course), but proportions are much higher among Million Plus providers. You can use this view to explore all the responses (Category marker) to every question (Question marker) in this survey by group – and mousing over the bar chart will let you see individual provider responses.

The top three priority economic contributions question is also interesting on a map view:

[Full screen]

Here we see providers who cite “knowledge exchange” as a priority economic contribution – and we can see that there are no institutions citing this in their top three in Devon and Cornwall. and only two in Yorkshire.

This is 2019-20 data, so we are largely pre-Covid (providers did get extra time to make data returns), but it is fascinating to see that large parts of the sector were already offering online learning. We don’t get an indication of the scale of this activity here, but it is instructive to note that Scotland and Wales were particularly well prepared – with every provider offering some form of online learning.

[Full screen]

I appreciate there’ll be some interest in seeing provider responses in full, so I built a view that will allow you to do that. Select your provider in the top drop-down, and your question of interest in the second one. If you’re interested in previous responses, use the academic year slider at the bottom.

[Full screen]

One response to “Strategic priorities from HESA BCI

  1. David, Knowledge exchange is a ‘catch all’ that is described by most of the other phrases. I’m sure we’d all say that what we are doing is knowledge exchange but when you are asked to select 3 things you choose the three most important specific things you are doing – In Exeter’s case we would say our biggest contribution to regional development is research collaboration, meeting regional skills needs and student start-ups.

Leave a Reply