59 Virtual Brochure – March 2025 Notable changes in terms of increases in risk score and/or relative positioning compared to 2022/23 include: • Estates infrastructure: while the proportion of risk registers including estates as a strategic risk has fallen, it still appears on 55% of risk registers, and intrinsic scores have increased. Risk definitions reflect a wide range of issues and concerns, taking account of individual institutional footprints and strategies. This is explored further in section 3. • Other compliance: this category includes a broad range of legal and regulatory requirements and appears on 55% of registers in our sample. The increased prominence in our analysis this year appears to be driven largely by compliance with UKVI requirements, although safeguarding, Prevent and health and safety are also prominent. • Research: 50% of the risk registers have research as a strategic risk. The increase in intrinsic risk ranking this year appears to be solely linked to risks around the non-achievement of income targets for research and knowledge exchange. This is explored further in section 4. • Apprenticeships: while only appearing on 27% of strategic risk registers, 2024 has a seen sharp increase in ranking in terms of intrinsic risk score. This is likely to reflect the experiences of institutions following ESFA and Ofsted audits and inspections which have highlighted gaps in compliance and resulted in financial clawbacks at a number of institutions. We also analysed the distribution of inherent risk scores for each theme across institutions. This demonstrates a strong consensus about the scoring of well-understood legal, regulatory or compliance risks, and also a consensus in some areas risk appetite is likely to be low (e.g. industrial relations, data, and also apprenticeships). In all other areas, we see wide variability across institutions in terms of inherent risk scores. This is a reflection of different institutional missions, strategies, financial positions and estates. We note that the widest variability in relation to financial sustainability, estates infrastructure and cybersecurity.
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