The 2023-24 HESA student data release was delayed by three rather than six months this year.
We’re clearly getting better at dealing with the output (and the associated errors) of data collected through the HESA Data Platform. While there are not as many identified issues as in last year’s cycle the list is long and occasionally unnerving.
Some represent a winding back from last year’s errors (we found 665 distance learning students at the University of Buckingham that should have been there last year), some are surprisingly big (the University of East London should have marked an extra 2,550 students as active), and some are just perplexing: the University of South Wales apparently doesn’t know where 1,570 students came from , the University of Portsmouth doesn’t actually have 470 students from the tiny Caribbean island of St Barthélemy.
Access and participation
It is surprising how little access and participation data, in the traditional sense, that HESA now publishes. We get an overview at sector level (the steady growth of undergraduate enrollments from the most deprived parts of England is notable and welcome), but there is nothing by provider level.
One useful proxy for non-traditional students is entry qualifications. We get these by subject area – we learn that in 2025 a quarter of full time undergraduate business students do not have any formal qualifications at all.
With the UK’s four regulators far from agreement as to what should be monitored to ensure that participation reflects potential rather than privilege, it’s not really worth HESA publishing a separate set of UK wide statistics. The closest we get is SEISA, which is now official statistics. I look forward to seeing SEISA applied to UK-domiciled students at individual providers, and published by HESA.
Student characteristics
We get by subject area data on disability (at a very general, “marker” – known disability – level) which I have plotted on a by year basis. The axis here is the proportion of students with a known disability – the colours show the total number of students. For me the story here is that creative subjects appear to attract students who disclose disabilities – art and creative writing in particular.
I’ve also plotted ethnicity by provider, allowing you to see the ways in which the ethnic make up of providers has changed over time.
Student domicile (UK)
UK higher education includes four regulated systems – one in each of the four nations. Although in the main students domiciled in a given nation study at providers based in that same nation, there is a small amount of cross-border recruitment.
Notably nearly three in ten Welsh students study at English providers, including more than a third of Welsh postgraduates. And two in ten Northern Irish students study in England. The concern is that if you move to study, you are less likely to move home – so governments in Wales and Northern Ireland (where there are student number controls) will be thinking carefully about the attractiveness and capacity of their respective systems to avoid a “brain drain”.
Within these trends, particular providers have proven particularly efficient in cross-border recruitment. If you are a Northern Irish student studying in England chances are you are at Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, or Northumbria. If you are Welsh and studying in England your destination may well be UWE, Bristol, Chester – or again, Liverpool John Moores.
There is a proximity effect – where students are crossing the border, they are likely to stay close to it – but also (if we look at Northern Ireland domiciled students looking at Glasgow or Newcastle) evidence of wider historic cultural links.
Student domicile (international)
Thinking about providers recruiting from Northern Ireland made me wonder about students from the Republic of Ireland – do we see similar links? As you might expect, the two larger providers in Northern Ireland recruit a significant share, but other winners include the University of Edinburgh and St Margaret’s. UCL has the biggest population among English providers.
You can use this chart to look at where students from any country in the world end up when they study in the UK (I do insist you look at those St Barthélemy students – literally all at the University of Portsmouth apparently).
An alternate view lets you look at the international population of your institution – the established pattern (China in the Russell Group, India elsewhere) still holds up.
What’s of interest to nervous institutional managers is the way international recruitment is changing over time. This is a more complicated dashboard that helps you see trends at individual providers for a given country, seen along with how your recruitment sits within the sector (mouse over an institution to activate the time series at the bottom.
