Mapping SHAPE academic staff

The British Academy’s Mapping SHAPE project was launched in 2024 to explore the changing landscape of SHAPE in the UK’s higher education providers.

Using interactive data dashboards and analysis, the project aims to help policymakers, academics and those with an interest in UK higher education understand the vital contributions that staff and students in SHAPE disciplines make across the UK’s nations and regions. It also highlights what is at stake if these disciplines are diminished or unevenly distributed in ways that disadvantage particular places or communities, and the positive role these disciplines play in fostering cultural vibrancy, social cohesion and economic resilience in a rapidly changing world.

As part of this work, the British Academy has analysed how cuts to university courses and departments are exacerbating inequalities in provision of, and access to, SHAPE subjects.

Teaching and research in higher education relies on the skilled labour of technical, professional services and academic staff. As a national academy, the British Academy has focused this stage of the Mapping SHAPE project on academic staff.

Academic staff act as key producers of new ideas in the UK’s research and innovation ecosystem; developers of future talent and skills; and key contributors to the impact that higher education institutions make from the local level to the global stage.

This work presents trends and patterns in academic staff data since 2012/13 and enables users to explore changes across time, subject areas, place, and different employment characteristics.

To understand these patterns, it is essential to situate them within the wider policy, funding and regulatory environment. Measures taken at both governmental and institutional levels to address challenges and opportunities have shaped where staff can work and the conditions under which they are employed. To frame our analysis, this section outlines the recent policy context drawing attention to key developments without aiming to be exhaustive.

Following the establishment of devolved legislatures in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland through the 1998 settlements, responsibility for higher education was transferred from Westminster, allowing each nation to develop its own approaches to the regulation of universities. Over time, this has led to increasing divergence between the four nations, particularly in areas such as student finance and institutional governance. Despite this there is still a UK research system, with elements of policy and funding decided centrally in London and institutions remain interconnected through student and staff mobility.

For much of the twentieth century, the responsibility for teaching and research in universities was held by a single Secretary of State in the Department for Education and Science. In 2007, this department was split into the Department for Education (DfE) and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS), The responsibility for universities in England sat within DIUS. Over the next decade, while DIUS changed its name and remit, it nevertheless retained oversight over both the teaching and research aspects of universities, reflecting the deeply interconnected nature of these roles.

The remit for teaching and research in England only began to diverge more clearly in 2016. While both areas of the portfolio were still overseen by a single minister, responsibility for higher education and students moved to the Department for Education (DfE), while responsibility for research fell under the auspices of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS – which in turn would become the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) in 2023).

This bifurcation of teaching and research was reinforced in 2017 through the Higher Education and Research Act (HERA), which split responsibility for funding and regulation of teaching and research respectively between the newly created Office for Students (OfS) and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and its constituent funding councils. Finally, in 2020, the brief was formally split across two ministerial portfolios, each operating in a separate government department, completing the structural separation of teaching and research in higher education at the level of government policy.

Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales have tended to retain more integrated structures. In these nations, single bodies – the Scottish Funding Council (SFC), Medr in Wales, and the Department for the Economy in Northern Ireland – oversee teaching and research funding in a more coordinated way, often alongside broader strategic planning for the tertiary sector. Although UK-wide research funding through UKRI operates across all four nations, the absence of a strict regulatory divide equivalent to the OfS/UKRI split means that teaching and research remain more closely aligned in policy and funding terms outside England.

At the time our academic staff dataset starts, in 2012, loan-backed tuition fees in England & Wales rose to a maximum of £9,000 a year. The following year, the removal of student number controls was announced (though only implemented in the 2015/16 academic year). The language of HERA and the regulatory powers of the OfS over registered providers brought greater focus on students and encouraged competition between providers within a ‘market’ for higher education provision. This policy architecture was intended to drive innovation and quality.

The increased competition fostered through funding changes and regulation in England and Wales was further intensified by the introduction of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) in 2017. The TEF assesses and rates higher education providers on teaching quality, learning environment, student satisfaction, and student outcomes, awarding Gold, Silver or Bronze ratings. Participation is mandatory for registered providers in England, with voluntary participation in the devolved nations.

In Scotland, undergraduate teaching for Scottish-domiciled students is funded by the Scottish Government and administered through the SFC. The high cost of this block teaching grant means that domestic student numbers are capped. This means competition for places for Scottish-domiciled students is high, and there are strong financial incentives for institutions to recruit higher fee-paying students from the rest of the UK and internationally. As a result, this is likely to have implications for the academic workforce and recruitment practices.

Northern Ireland has more of a hybrid system, combining funding from tuition fees and teaching grants. The Department for the Economy administers teaching grants, maintaining a direct role in funding allocation. This approach blends student demand, reflected in fee income, with state support. With only four higher education institutions, the sector engages more directly with the devolved government, rather than through a regulator or funding council.

While successive governments’ focus on economic growth and skills has concentrated providers (and public) attention on the employability of students, it has also increased emphasis on the returns to investment in research and innovation. This has reinforced the importance of both quality-related funding mechanisms and competitive research funding streams in shaping institutional behaviour.

Since its implementation (replacing the Research Assessment Exercise) in 2014, the Research Excellence Framework (REF) has become the predominant measure of research activity and outputs across the UK, determining the allocation of recurrent, quality-related, non-hypothecated block-grant funding (QR funding). It is managed by Research England on behalf of the UK’s four higher education funding bodies, though allocation of funding is determined differently by the four national bodies. REF plays a central role in shaping research strategies and investment across institutions.

However, REF sits alongside a wider and highly significant ecosystem of competitive research funding, including UKRI research council grants, charitable funding and international sources such as the European Research Council (ERC). In 2024/25, a total of almost £2.9 billion was awarded to UK higher education institutions by UKRI and its constituent research councils. Of this, just over 3% (£99 million) came from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and 7% (£201 million) from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Humanities and social sciences researchers in the UK have performed strongly in ERC advanced grant competitions, with 25 awarded in the 2025 funding round, representing almost a third of total grants awarded in these disciplines.

Together, these funding streams shape institutional priorities in different ways. QR funding supports core activities such as staff salaries, research infrastructure and the development of early career researchers, making REF performance an important factor in recruitment and promotion decisions. Competitive funding, by contrast, plays a major role in determining the scale and direction of research activity, and requires significant institutional and academic investment in competitive grant application processes, often over multiple rounds. QR funding is particularly vital for many SHAPE disciplines, which typically receive less competitive grant funding than STEM subjects from research councils and other funders.

The UK’s Modern Industrial Strategy, published in June 2025 and updated through early 2026, sets out a ten‑year, ‘whole‑of‑government’ plan to boost productivity, resilience and long‑term growth by concentrating support on eight priority sectors (the ‘IS‑8’). It combines sector‑specific plans with cross‑cutting reforms aimed at improving the business environment, including skills, planning, energy costs, finance and regional growth to provide stability and oversight beyond electoral cycles.

The Strategy’s emphasis on skills and talent has direct implications for the academic workforce in UK higher education. Researchers in the social sciences and humanities are central to developing the analytical, societal, cultural, ethical and regulatory capabilities that underpin all eight IS‑8 sectors, from governance, public trust and regulation in life sciences and AI, to design, language, culture and market understanding in the creative industries and professional services.

Evidence also shows that graduates from humanities and social science disciplines move into IS‑8 sectors at high rates, supporting innovation diffusion, organisational capacity and productivity growth. However, the recent government White Paper on skills and the emerging focus of Skills England tend to frame skills primarily in STEM and technical terms. Failing to embed the humanities and social sciences – and the academic workforce that sustains them – into industrial and skills policy risks a narrower conception of ‘skills’ and an underutilisation of the full spectrum of capabilities the Industrial Strategy itself depends upon.

Against this background of regulatory change and policy reform, the UK’s higher education sector is experiencing significant financial strain, with cross-subsidisation emerging as a central feature of how institutions manage competing pressures. While the forms and extent of cross-subsidisation vary across nations and institutions, two broad patterns are evident: the cross-subsidisation of more expensive to teach subjects, often in STEM, by lower-cost to teach provision, including many SHAPE disciplines; and the cross-subsidisation of both teaching and research for domestic students and staff through income from international student fees.

While tuition fees for domestic students in England have increased nearly tenfold since their introduction in 1998, the real-terms value of the amount available for teaching each student (the unit of resource) has been continuously eroded by inflation and other rising costs. The current Government’s planned increase to £9,535 for the 2025/26 academic year may provide limited relief given the scale of the financial challenge facing providers.

At the same time, the ability of universities to recover the full economic costs of research, including equipment and facilities costs, has declined. Introduced in 2002, the full economic costing (fEC) model was designed to allow research councils to award up to 80% of the total cost of research, on a competitive basis, contingent on universities covering the remaining costs. However, in 2023/24, providers recovered an average of 67% of fEC, down from 78% in 2010-2011. Recovery rates are typically even lower for less research-intensive providers.

As a result of low cost-recovery and the falling unit of resource in teaching, fees from international students have become increasingly important for cross-subsidising teaching and research. Recruitment of international students, however, has proved uncertain in recent years due to wider geopolitical factors. The economic and wider value international students bring to universities and to the UK has increasingly conflicted Government commitments to reduce net migration and with tightening visa rules. Numbers of international students peaked in 2022/23, and the Government’s proposals to introduce a levy on fees from international students threatens to deepen the financial pressures facing the sector.

To what extent these policy and financial shifts are influencing staffing structures across the sector remains unclear. However, combined with other challenges, including the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the ability of individual providers and the sector as a whole to balance and sustain competing demands has likely been significantly affected. In response, many providers have begun to reduce staffing levels, leading to substantial restructuring and staff redundancies across institutions. These cuts have been felt across a breadth of subjects but are particularly concentrated in SHAPE disciplines. We expect that the impacts of this will increasingly be reflected in future releases of staff data.

In this context, understanding not only sector developments but regional and national patterns is imperative. The SHAPE Observatory offers users an open access evidence base and analytical resource at a time when shifting economic conditions, challenging employment trends for young people and graduates, rapid technological change and evolving geopolitical pressures underscore the importance of a well-functioning higher education, research and innovation system in the UK.

Mapping SHAPE staff trends draws on a bespoke Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) academic staff record dataset purchased from Jisc. As opposed to traditional staff analyses at the HESA cost centre level, we used HESA’s academic discipline field to map HECoS codes to substantive SHAPE discipline classifications. This approach allows analysis of staff at a more granular level than cost centres and facilitates a direct comparison between staff and student subject-level data.

For example, the bespoke dataset shows staff coded under individual languages, rather than the cost centre Modern languages. It also shows staff working in disciplines like History of Art, a discipline that has been aggregated with others in the cost centre system. For our staff trends analysis, we have used the same coding of SHAPE subjects as the student analysis.

All data has been rounded and suppressed according to HESA’s rounding and suppression methodology.

Scope

The map of SHAPE academic staff explores changes by subject at higher education institutions from 2012/13 to 2024/25 (the most recently reported year of data), providing longitudinal analysis of a transformative period.

How to interpret reported figures

The map does not use a headcount of staff. Instead, it reports full-person equivalent (FPE) totals for the group defined by the combination of filters in use. In our dataset, each individual academic can hold more than one contract with an institution, and each contract may involve more than one different activity. An individual’s FPE total (FPE = 1) is evenly apportioned in fractions across the number of contracts they teach or research on. If, for example, an academic teaches both ‘English Language and Literature’ and ‘Creative Writing’, it will contribute 0.5 FPE to each. This means that subject FPE totals are calculated from fractions of academics.

FPE figures come only from contracts that were active on 1 December within a reporting period; HESA refers to this as the ‘staff contract population’.

In contrast to full-time equivalent (FTE), FPE improves usability by reducing the number of cases where data is rounded, according to HESA rules, to zero.

Filters available

Users can filter the map to show provision by FPE by academic year. They can also filter the map by subject group (e.g. Languages and Area Studies) and by specific subjects, if applicable (e.g. French Studies). The providers displayed can be filtered by region or selected individually in the provider filter.

The map shows data by individual providers (institutions). Users can see where staff numbers by FPE have increased or decreased at different providers across the UK. Each provider is represented by a coloured bubble. The three colours for the bubbles indicate either an increase in staff numbers by FPE since the selected year (blue), a decrease (orange), or no change (grey). Hovering over a provider’s bubble shows percentage change in academic staff FPE since the previous year and since 2012/13, with a graph showing trends at that provider over time.

The initial year of analysis (2012/13) was chosen due to the changes in contract variable definitions that year. Currently, the maps use HESA provider data up to the academic year 2024/25. The data for 2025/26 will be added when it becomes available in 2027.

Users can filter the data across four additional dimensions (by selecting ‘Click here to select staff group’). The four filters use HESA wording unless stated:

• Users can filter by the employment function of the contract for staff, selecting one or combinations of research only, teaching and research, and teaching only.
• The maps can be filtered by terms of employment, which allows the user to view whether contracts are fixed-term or open-ended/permanent
• Users can filter by mode of employment, to see whether contracts are full-time or part-time.
• We have grouped HESA’s more granular categories for contract level into four groups: early career; mid career/established; professor; and senior career.

We have excluded from the staff group tab categories with very small numbers (‘neither teaching nor research’ from employment function; ‘atypical’ from terms of employment; and ‘other level’, ‘senior management’, and ‘unknown’ from contract level), but totals contain the excluded categories.

The map depicts provision at the location of higher education institutions as this appears in HESA data. This means that multi-campus institutions are represented by one bubble on the map. The data used in the map is only as accurate as information reported to HESA by providers based on statutory returns.

You may also find it useful to read relevant FAQs on the Mapping SHAPE provision page.

Integral to assessing the health of the SHAPE disciplines is understanding trends in academic staffing who produce research and develop student skills. The maps are intended to provide a visual representation of answers to questions including:

• Where are staff numbers expanding or contracting across SHAPE subjects and providers?
• How are changes in staff numbers distributed geographically across the UK?
• How are staff numbers shifting across subjects and disciplines?
• How are employment models changing across the sector, and what does this mean for teaching and research?
• How is the composition of the workforce changing by career stage?
• Where are there mismatches or divergences between institutions within the same subject or region?