Where do all the figures come from that are used in the League and Subject Tables and how do I know they are reliable?
Most of them come from the universities themselves in an annual return they make to the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA). The Agency has strict rules for these returns and carries out regular audits of the data prior to accepting them. We then decide what data we want to use, define a detailed spec, and buy the data from HESA. But before it all comes to us, each university is sent its own dataset and invited to let us know if there are any errors. That done, we check ourselves and go back to the universities for clarification. This whole exercise of to-ing and fro-ing takes about two months. So I hope you can see we try to get it right first time every time. But we are dealing with thousands of figures and the advantage of our online guide is that we can rectify any mistakes as quickly as possible. By the way, the annual datasets from HESA become available over a seven month period, not all at the same time, and this plus all the checking and rechecking is the reason why we ha
