Higher Education Strategic Risk Analysis Report 2025/26 8 Overall Risk Trends Our university risk register analysis provides an indepth analysis of the strategic risk registers of 20 universities of widely diverse size, mission, and organisation. We categorise each strategic risk against one of 23 themes and establish normalised scores for inherent and residual risk scores using a 0-1 scale. This enables us to compare and consider how different institutions score their strategic risks pre and post-mitigation, and provides a means to explore how attitudes to strategic risk and effective risk controls change over time. Information about our methodology can be found at Appendix A. One noticeable change from our 2025/26 analysis is that overall, normalised inherent risk scores are on average higher in 2025/26 than in 2024/25. Across the 23 risk categories, inherent risks in 15 areas (65%) were, on average, scored more highly than in 2024/25. This suggests that institutions believe that in these 15 areas, either the likelihood of the risk occurring and/or the severity of its potential impact for the institution, is increasing. In particular, there are four areas where there is a significant differential in the increased score: in relation to partnerships; institutions’ IT and digital estates; the UK policy environment; and student recruitment. These issues are explored further in Section 2. By comparison, average residual risk scores show a broadly similar range and pattern to 2024/25, suggesting that while certain risks may be increasing, institutions remain confident in their abilities to manage these risks effectively. It should be noted that the risk registers used for this analysis pre-date the publication of the English Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper and the Budget. While these announcements, particularly those relating to proposed tuition fee increases, the levy on international students, and the regulation of partnerships, may have subsequently influenced risk scores in relation to financial sustainability or partnerships, they are unlikely to have significantly changed the risk landscape. Figure 1 summarises our overall analysis, showing the average inherent and residual risk score for each thematic area, ranked in order by average inherent risk score. As over the last three years, cybersecurity remains in pole position as the most significant inherent risk that institutions are managing. It’s no surprise that student recruitment and financial sustainability risks, rank second and joint third respectively, are in very similar positions to 2024/25 (third and fifth respectively). This is to be expected given the increasingly competitive markets for domestic and Figure 1
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