The HESA return is hardest for the providers least built to do it

Ask who runs the HESA student return at a large university and you’ll get a team. A returns manager, a couple of analysts, someone who owns the student record system, a planning office that knows the coding manual well enough to argue with it. They still find it hard. They still lose (many) evenings to it. But the work is spread across people whose job it is.

Ask the same question at a small or specialist provider and the answer is usually a name. One person. Often someone whose job title has nothing to do with data, who also handles admissions, or quality, or registry, or all three, and who inherited the return because nobody else could be persuaded to take it on.

That person is doing the same return. The same data model, the same quality rules, the same deadlines, the same consequences if it goes wrong. HESA does not run a lighter version for smaller providers, and the OfS does not read your data more gently because you have eighty students rather than eighty thousand. The return scales with complexity, not headcount, and most of the complexity is fixed.

This is the part of the sector I spend most of my time in, and it is where the return does its damage.

Why small providers feel it most

Some of it is arithmetic. A large provider can absorb a bad week. One person cannot be in two places at once, and if your returns lead is off sick in the collection window, the return stops.

Some of it is knowledge. The coding manual is long, the guidance changes, and a lot of what makes a return go smoothly is accumulated know-how: which fields cause trouble, what a credibility report is telling you, how a particular course structure maps onto the data model. Large teams build that up and pass it on. In a small provider it lives in one head, and when that person leaves, it leaves with them. It is not unusual for a provider to start the return almost from scratch because the person who knew how to do it has moved on.

Some of it is systems. Small providers are more likely to be running a student record system that was never built with HESA in mind – a spreadsheet, a database someone built years ago, a product designed for a different market. That means the return involves translating everything by hand rather than exporting it. Even for those that were supposedly built for HESA returns don’t always deliver as promised.

And some of it is stakes. For a small provider registered with the OfS, the data in the return feeds the same regulatory picture as anyone else’s: continuation, completion, outcomes. A handful of misclassified students in a cohort of sixty moves a percentage far more than the same error in a cohort of six thousand. Small numbers are less forgiving, not more.

What helps

None of this means small providers are doomed to dread the return. It means the fixes look different from the ones large institutions use.

Write it down. The most valuable thing a small provider can own is a return handbook: how your courses map to the data model, which fields you get wrong and why, the decisions you made last year and the reasons for them. It turns the return from something that lives in a person into something the organisation owns.

Make the system do the work. Wherever you can, capture data at enrolment in the form HESA needs it, rather than converting it later. Every field that has to be recoded by hand during the collection window is an error waiting for an opportunity.

Don’t leave it to one person. Even if one person leads, someone else should understand enough to keep it moving. Shadowing a single return is enough to turn a single point of failure into a manageable risk.

Start early and keep going. With collection moving towards an in-year model, there is less of a single window to fix things at the end. Checking quality as the year runs is far kinder than discovering everything at once.

And know when to bring in help. Not to do the return for you forever, but to get the foundations right: the mapping, the handbook, the validation checks, the training for whoever picks it up next. For a small provider, a few days of the right support can be the difference between a return that is survived each year and one that runs.

The point

The HESA return is not harder for small providers because they are less capable. It is harder because the same job lands on far fewer people, with less margin for error and less room to absorb a bad year. The answer is not to work harder in the collection window. It is to build the return so it stops depending on any one person’s memory, effort or health.

If the return in your organisation has a single name attached to it, that is the first thing to change.