Information for members on HEAT’s annual subscription

Following consultation, our Governance and Steering have ratified a new way of calculating subscription rises ongoing.

These will be fixed for a three-year period, 2024-2026, enabling members to forecast and manage budgets more easily. This model also helps the Service manage the self-sustaining budget against a backdrop of fluctuating costs and a loss in income with Uni Connect funding reductions. After careful consideration the HEAT Steering and Governance Groups have decided to set the HEAT annual subscription rise at 7% between 2024/25 and 2026/27. After 2026/27 this will be reviewed, with an aim to reduce it to keep future costs as low as possible.*

A sustainable service for the next three years

The decision to set the rise at 7% for the next three years was not an easy one to make and we are acutely aware of the financial pressures most providers are currently facing.

Unlike most data services, HEAT is not-for-profit and providing low cost access to data and tools is central to our mission.

The HEAT Governance and Steering Groups have decided that, if we want to continue to provide the service, 7% is the lowest we are able to set the rise given the budgetary constraints we are also facing.

Like most of our members, at HEAT we are also facing increasing operating costs, particularly IT and server costs which have increased by 20% over the last academic year. Members of the Governance Group with technical expertise have warned us that the increases we are seeing are unlikely to slow down and that this is being felt across the sector where IT costs are typically increasing by an average of 9% per year.

Therefore, it was decided that 7% was the minimum rate to enable HEAT to continue to provide the current service over the next three years. Even with this rate, we will not be able to achieve a zero balanced budget and will use reserves to help with any deficit, working in parallel to increase our income through growth and make efficiencies where we can. A lower increase rate will compound our deficit and destabilise our longer-term sustainability. Our aim is to attain a zero balanced budget by 2028.

Value for money

Most members using HEAT will be aware of the value the service provides. By sharing in systems and data we all benefit through economies of scale, as data can be processed once, centrally, then shared out to multiple members across the sector. Many members tell us that they would not be able to replicate what the service provides for the cost of subscription. Our conservative cost-benefit analysis (members only) estimates that it would cost an organisation just under £80,000 to independently produce what they receive through the HEAT Service. Currently, the HEAT subscription is less than one eighth of this, equivalent to the salary of one data analyst for just one day per week. This provides Core HEAT members with a 900% return on their investment, receiving £9 in return for every £1 spent based on the subscription costs for 2024/25.

For this your organisation and multiple users have access to a shared database to manage data, comprehensive school and college data for targeting, data for key outcomes through the HEAT Track (outcomes which are notoriously difficult to access), a range of dashboards for data visualisation, and training and support through webinars and data clinics.

On request of our members, we are now also expanding the service, so it supports the evaluation of Post-entry (as well as Access) interventions. All of this enables the membership to evaluate their work based on data and evidence, and therefore meet the increased evaluation expectations put in place by the Office for Students (OfS) as part of the Access and Participation Plan (APP) reforms. The OfS expects members to include HEAT subscription costs in their Research and Evaluation Investment figures.

To continue to provide this service we really need your support. As our users, please work with us to show that HEAT is not an expendable service. We realise that it takes a lot of staff time to use our service fully – and we are always working on ways to make the system and dashboards as user friendly as possible – but we need you to help us do this, by engaging with our resources and working with us to get the most out of the service we have all developed together.