What is the HESA Staff Return?
HESA (the Higher Education Statistics Agency) oversees the collection, assurance and sharing of higher education data. This includes the HESA staff return; a mandatory data collection exercise for all UK HEIs, who are required to provide information about all contracted staff within a census period of 1 August – 31 July.
Data provided includes personal characteristics, contractual details, and the activities undertaken as a result of those contracts.
Why is it so important?
The quality and accuracy of the data we submit is paramount, as it is used by government bodies, policymakers, and funding bodies (including the Research Excellence Framework) to assess our performance and effectiveness.
Our submission contributes to policies, funding allocations, and strategic decisions in the education sector and serves as a basis for benchmarking activities by sector bodies such as UCEA (Universities and Colleges Employers Association).
Some of the sector data is publicly available via HESA’s Open Data website, which is regularly used by the media, potentially influencing our reputation – particularly if our data is incomplete!
The staff return includes a range of data sourced from PeopleXD (the University’s HR system), as well as data generated off-system. The data collected undergoes rigorous validation by our team to ensure accuracy and my role is pivotal in this. I lead on the key HESA tasks, such as:
- Ensuring data accuracy and resolving errors;
- Submitting the initial return to HESA;
- Resolving issues identified by HESA; and
- Preparing the final submission for sign-off by the Vice-Chancellor.
This work spans the entire year, with approximately 130 days’ effort dedicated solely to tasks undertaken from August to mid-November alone.
How can HR colleagues support the HESA staff return?
Some of our common challenges are missing or inconsistent staff data in PeopleXD. HESA has specific requirements about which data items should be submitted for each staff category and if someone’s staff classification and category code in PeopleXD aren’t right, we can end up with missing data or time wasted in processing data we don’t need, which can delay our entire submission.
One of the most important ways HR staff can help is to regularly check their department data in PeopleXD, so any issues are caught and corrected as soon as possible. You can check the data quality errors for your department using the Data Validation reports for employees (view here) and casual workers (view here).
Errors can also be minimised by always following the system guidance when adding or updating staff information in PeopleXD, especially for key processes such as appointing.
The most critical time of year for resolving data errors is the August payroll deadline. This includes processing any late July starters, leavers or contract changes, so that we have a complete data set to work on. Any changes made after this date have the potential to delay the University’s submission, which incurs fines.
Are there any particular areas of focus this year?
HESA has rigorous processes in place to check the quality of the data we submit. If we fail to meet their thresholds for data completeness, targets for improvement are issued to us.
This year’s targets from HESA are focussed on our relatively high levels of unknown diversity characteristics, academic teaching qualifications and previous employment.
We are hoping that the new onboarding functionality in PeopleXD will help improve our collection rates for staff on new contracts; and reduce the amount of data departmental HR staff have to process themselves.
We would ideally like to collect actual values for diversity characteristics to assist with and monitor the University’s commitment to fostering an inclusive culture which promotes equality, values diversity and maintains a working, learning and social environment in which the rights and dignity of all its staff and students are respected.
We do understand that not everyone is comfortable sharing this information, and given the options are limited to census categories, an individual might not find the response they wish to record. Where staff do not wish to disclose this information, or do not wish to use one of the available values, it would still make a valuable contribution to our completeness rates if they selected the ‘Prefer not to say’ option instead of leaving the field blank.
What can we expect from this year’s submission process?
I’m pleased to say that HESA hasn’t introduced many changes to this year’s return, unlike last year! However, we are making some changes ourselves.
Last year we undertook a Focus-led review of our entire HESA Staff Return process and we’re now working to implement the recommendations identified to enhance our approach for this year. This includes spreading responsibilities for this work across our team, automating the extraction of HESA-specific data items, and streamlining some of the data assurance steps. These changes aim to improve efficiency and ease some of the deadlines associated with the return, to enable an increased focus on the crucial data assurance stages. We’re also bringing a fresh approach to the way we engage and communicate with colleagues in departments about these processes. This includes a special communication from HR Systems outlining our approach to this year's HESA staff data return and contains the actions and deadlines for departments between now and November 2024.
We’re feeling optimistic about the impact of these changes and look forward to sharing our progress throughout the year.
