VC pay 2019-20

I can’t for the life of me think why, but the Office for Students seems to be softening the usual crowd-pleasing invective on senior staff pay this time round.

A part of it is bound to be simply that there is less salacious material to report. Forty-eight per cent of providers have seen a decrease or no change in head of provider pay since 2018-19 – the average change in salary is positive, but a long way below the most recent UCEA negotiated pay deal.

Of course, not all of this is because of pay restraint – indeed, the examples of pay restraint we saw during the pandemic are not included in this years data. The expansion of the pool of providers examined (primarily adding smaller, newer, providers to the list) is going to be driving these averages down.

Here’s the HESA data that underpins the OfS analysis – click on a provider to see the full detail of pay, you can choose the year using the filter at the top and if you want to sort by something other than total remuneration you can do that via the dropdown on the right (Swansea is the most generous when it comes to a company car, for instance)

The graph

[Full screen]

OfS concludes that “there is evidence of pay restraint in the sector”, and notes good levels of compliance with disclosure requirements. The CUC code of practice is being used widely but not everywhere.