The data secrets of HEFCW capital funding

HEFCW’s 2024-25 capital funding allocations are, above a £750,000 minimum value, determined by the size of an institution. The more students (FTE) studying at a university, the more funding is potentially made available for capital projects.

This is a wholly unremarkable way of determining capital grants – prior to the OfS’ recent experiments with bidding completions is was pretty much the standard approach across the UK. What is remarkable is the use of 2022-23 student data. The FTE values are taken from the 2022-23 HESA Student collection – the first glimpse from this year of data to be published.

The official position on that year of data is, to quote the text provided by HESA:

Following recent discussions with UK statutory bodies, we now expect to publish the HESA Student bulletin and open data in August 2024. This is to align with ongoing engagement between UK statutory bodies and HE providers on data for regulatory and funding purposes. This later publication will enable us to include any data resubmissions up until 30 April in the August HESA publications.

What’s notable here is that HESA itself is clear that the data is ready to go, a long time before August:

We have completed our enhanced data quality assessment. This will now form the basis of a comprehensive set of quality information for users of the publications. It also informs the publication schedule which requires approval from the OfS in England and statutory HE bodies in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

You don’t need to be party to a large amount of sector data related gossip to read between the lines here. The student data is ready. It is of sufficient data quality (as HEFCW has now proved) for use in funding allocations. What’s missing is the “approval” from statutory bodies. HEFCW are clearly on board. And the Office for Students is not.

The reason given is that OfS is engaging with providers regarding the quality of the data. While this is a perfectly reasonable part of the process, especially following the start of a radically changed collection process and the widespread concerns regarding how this worked in practice, it is also true that it has already happened. Providers (as, to be fair happens most years) have worked with HESA post-submission to ensure data is credible and reliable. And this was complete by the end of April.

By insisting on an August publication for the (main) open data collection – OfS is also putting it’s own publication scheme in jeopardy. Indeed, as things stand, OfS looks set to break its own embargo by publishing those ridiculously complex “data dashboards” (covering, for example B3 condition data) in July 2024.

Which leaves me asking – why can’t we have the HESA Student open data for the 2022-23 academic year now? Why couldn’t we have had it in early May? Why can regulators use the data even though the public and the wider sector cannot see the data?