FOI_25-202 Academic staff common aggregation hierarchy
Date of response: 30 July 2025
We have now considered your request of 02 July 2025 for the following information:
I am writing under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to request the following information regarding permanent academic staff.
Please provide aggregated count data for permanent academic staff broken down by ethnicity for each academic year from 2019/20 to the most recent year available. Specifically, I am requesting data that includes the following details:
o Provider’s UKPRN: Your institution's UKPRN.
o Academic Year: The relevant academic year.
o Discipline: Please use the Common Aggregation Hierarchy tier 2 (e.g. CAHnn-nn), you may use digits or labels, but these must be consistent with the CAH specification. The Common Aggregation Hierarchy (CAH) provides a standardised hierarchical aggregation of subject codes suitable for analysis, with tier 2 comprising 35 subject groups that allow for consistent subject classification across institutions and time periods.
o Academic Rank: The position held by the staff members (e.g., Professor, Senior Lecturer, Lecturer, Associate Professor, Assistant Professor etc).
o Total Permanent Staff: The total number of permanent academic staff in the specified category.
o A breakdown of the total permanent staff by ethnicity:
§ White
§ Black, Black British, Black Welsh, Caribbean or African
§ Asian, Asian British or Asian Welsh
§ Mixed or Multiple ethnic groups
§ Other Ethnic Group
§ Prefer Not to say
§ Not recorded/NA
In relation to your standard HESA reporting, ensure that you include all employees with an academic employment function of 1,2 and 3 and with terms of 1. In relation to senior academic roles, for the purposes of this FOI request, Professors (e.g. UCEA contract level 5A/F1) should be grouped with more senior contract levels (or more junior as the case may be) as long as the individual also carries the title of Professor. As such I am interested in the academic rank rather than administrative responsibilities.
Note on Data Protection:
I understand that some cells in the requested data may contain small numbers that could potentially identify individuals. To address this concern, I am happy for the following HESA statistical disclosure control methods to be applied:
o Counts between 2.5 and 5 to be rounded to 5
o Any count lower than 2.5 to be rounded to 0
I only request that it is clearly indicated where these disclosure control rules have been applied to the data provided, so I can accurately interpret the information. If another method of rounding/suppression is used, please articulate it clearly.
Data Format:
I would appreciate it if the data could be provided in an electronic, machine-readable format (for example, as a CSV file) e.g.:
Table 1: Staff Data
UKPRN Academic Year Discipline (CAH2) Academic Rank White Black Asian, Mixed Other Ethnic Group Prefer Not to say Not recorded/NA
12345 2019/20 Medicine and Dentistry Professor 38 12 42 12 43 98 0
12345 2019/20 Vetinary Sciences Associate Professor 48 21 24 21 34 89 0
12345 2019/20 Law Professor 18 1 2 0 0 1 1
12345 2020/21 Psychology Professor 40 0 5 1 0 2 0
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
Our response:
Please see accompanying document, our ref: FOI_25-202 Appendix A. Our UKPRN is 10007789.
We have not masked, redacted, edited or rounded any figures in our response.