HESA Spring 2025 kicks off in earnest with a full release of the staff data for 2023-24.
Unlike in previous years, there’s been no early release of the headlines – the statistics release (which provides an overview at sector level) and the full data release (which offers detail at provider level) have both turned up on the same day.
Staff data has, in previous years, generally been less volatile than student data. Whereas recruitment can and does lurch alarmingly around based on strategic priorities, government vacillation about student visas, and the vagaries of the student market – staff employment tends to be something with a merciful degree of permanency. Even if it isn’t the same staff working under the same terms and conditions, it does tend to need broadly the same number of people.
With the increasing financial pressures felt by universities you would expect 2023-24 to be a deviation from this norm.
Starters and leavers
We’ll start by looking at the numbers of starters and leavers from each provider. This chart shows the change in academic staff numbers year on year between your chosen year and the year before (as the thick bars) and the total number of full and part time staff in the year of your choice (as the thin bars). Over on the other side of the visualisation under the controls you can see total staff numbers, broken down into full and part time as a time series – mouse over a provider on the main chart to change the provider focus here. You can filter by year, and (for the main chart) mode of employment.
What’s apparent is that across quite a lot of the sector academic staff numbers didn’t change that much. There were some outliers at both end – Coventry University had 585 less academic staff in 2023-24 than 2022-23, while Cardiff University has 565 more (yes, the same Cardiff University that confirmed plans for 400 full time redundancies yesterday).
If you’ve been following sector news this may surprise you – last year saw many providers announce voluntary or compulsory redundancies. The Queen Mary University of London UCU branch has been tracking these announcements over time.
Schemes like this take time for a university to run – there is a mandatory consultation period, followed (hopefully) by some finessing of the scheme and then negotiations with individual staff members. It is not a way to make a quick, in year, saving. Oftentimes the original announcement is of a far higher number of staff redundancies than actually end up happening.
Subject level
If you work in a university or other higher education provider, you’ll know that stuff like this very often happens across particular departments and faculties rather than the whole university. I can’t offer you faculty level from public data, but there is data available by cost centre.
Cost centres are usually used in financial data, and do not cleanly map to visible structures within universities. Here you can select a provider and choose between cost centre groups and cost centres as two levels of detail. I’ve added an option to select contract type – in the main I suggest you leave this as academic (excluding atypical).
Zero hours
I’m sure I say this every year, but not all providers return data for non-academic staff (in England they are not required to), and an “atypical” contract usually refers to a very short period of work (a single guest lecture or suchlike). There is a pervasive myth that these are “zero hours” contracts – even though HESA publishes data on these separately:
Here’s a chart showing the terms of employment and pay arrangements related to zero hours contracts for 2023-24. You can see the majority of these are academic in nature, with a roughly even split between fixed term and open-ended terms. The majority (around 4,075) are paid by the hour.
This represents a small year-on-year growth in the use of this kind of contract – in 2022-23, there were 3,915 academic staff on a zero hour contract
Subject, age, and pay
I often wonder about the conditions of academic staff across subject areas, and how this pertains to the age of the academics involved and how much they are paid. This visualisation allows use to view age against salary (relating to groups of spine points on the standard New JNCHES pay scale used in most larger providers).
As you’d expect, overall there is a positive correlation between age and salary – if you are an older academic you are likely to be paid more. This is particularly pronounced in design, creative, and performing arts: where staff are likely to be older and better paid on average. Compare the physical sciences, where more staff are younger and spine points are lower.
This chart allows you to select a cost centre (either a group or individual cost centre), and filter by academic employment function (teaching, research, both…) and contract level (senior academics and professors, others…). There’s a range of years on offer as well.
Ethnicity
The main news stories that tend to come out of this release relate to academic staff characteristics, and specifically the low number of Black professors. There is some positive movement on that front this year, though the sector at that level is in no way representative of staff as a whole, the student body, or wider society.
