Annual funding

Formula teaching capital funding for 2019-20

Our capital funding supports sustainable investment in higher education learning and teaching.

For the financial year 2019-20 (which runs from 1 April 2019 to 31 March 2020), we are allocating £100 million in formula teaching capital funding.

Teaching capital

Capital grants are made to higher education providers registered with the OfS in the Approved (fee cap) category.

Teaching capital allocations are provided to enhance the learning experience of higher education students at providers, by helping raise the quality of their learning and teaching facilities. Providers might use their grants to invest in high-quality buildings, equipment or information technology.

We have calculated capital funding using:

Student numbers reported in the HESES18, HEIFES18 and HESF19 surveys. Students are counted in terms of student full-time equivalents (FTEs), which are a measure of how much a student studies over a year, compared with someone studying full-time
Methods agreed by our board in March 2019.

Providers receive a share of the £90 million budget in proportion to weighted student FTEs.

We use provider’s weighting factors that reflect those broad characteristics of their students which give rise to additional capital costs. Weighting factors include course characteristics and associated teaching costs, level of study (undergraduate or postgraduate), higher costs associated with students studying in London, additional support for successful outcomes for disabled students, and higher costs faced by specialist institutions because of the nature of their provision.

Not all providers receive a capital grant. We only give a provider a capital allocation if their share will be more than £10,000.

Capital grants are made for (and have to be spent within) a specific financial year. So for 2019-20 providers will have to completely spend their allocation by the end of March 2020.

Our 2019-20 capital allocations were announced in March 2019. A list of these allocations can be found in ‘Formula capital funding for 2019-20' (OfS 2019.13).

Other capital grants

We are providing £10 million to Jisc, which provides UK universities and colleges with shared digital infrastructure and services, such as the superfast Janet Network. The capital grant to Jisc is to support network upgrades, cybersecurity and learning analytics.

Funding for previous years

Capital funding 2018-19

For the financial year 2018-19 (1 April 2018 to 31 March 2019), we allocated £150 million in capital funding.

Teaching capital

Teaching capital grants help providers develop and improve their higher education infrastructure.

Providers might use their grants to invest in high-quality buildings, equipment or information technology.

Providers receive a share of the £104 million budget based on their share of teaching resource (which comprises our recurrent teaching grant and an assumption of their income from tuition fees). But providers only receive a capital grant if their share will be at least £10,000.

Capital grants are made for (and have to be spent within) a specific financial year. So for 2018-19 providers will have to have completely spent their allocation by the end of March 2019.

Our 2018-19 capital allocations were announced in May 2018.

A list of these allocations can be found in ‘Recurrent and formula capital funding for 2018-19’. We published a revised version of Annex A to this document in October 2018 to show updated allocations for some providers (including to capital grants). Changes arose from amendments to their student data and for other reasons.

Other capital grants

We also provided:

£10 million to Jisc to support network upgrades, cybersecurity and learning analytics
£36 million to meet the costs of commitments made by HEFCE that extend beyond March 2018.

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Annual funding

Formula teaching capital funding for 2019-20

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