Information about this report - Staff Monitoring Report 2024/25

This report has been prepared by the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) team as part of the University’s publication requirements under the Equality Act 2010 and Northern Ireland Act 1998, Section 75. An accessible version of the data from this report has been prepared on an Excel spreadsheet and is available to download from our website.​

Data covered in this report​

  1. Headcount data (the diversity of our staffing population; information on which staff groups are captured in the data can be found below)​
  2. Recruitment data (numbers and proportions of candidates from application, shortlisting to appointment)​

Reporting Period 

  1. Headcount data is a snapshot taken as at 31st July 2025 (presented as current year, 2024/25)​
  2. Previous year refers to a snapshot taken as at 31st July 2024 (presented as 2023/24)​
  3. Recruitment data reporting period runs from 1st August 2024 to 31st July 2025 (presented as academic year 2024/25)​

Please note that the EDI team only provide data for annual compliance monitoring and do not provide ad-hoc data requests. All staff data requests must be submitted through People Services.  If you have a question about this report, please contact us at [email protected] ​

Included in the data​

Academic Staff: Associate Lecturers, Central Academic Staff, Regional Academic Staff (also known as Staff Tutors), and Research staff ​

Professional & Support Staff: Academic-related (AR7-AR9), Support staff (GR3-GR6)​

Not included in the data​

  1. Open University subsidiaries: OU Worldwide (grade Z95), Open University Student Association (OUSA), Mulberry Bear​
  2. Contingency staff: temp/ agency workers, contractors/consultants, visitors etc​

Counting method

All data looks at the unique count of individual employees. ​

Employee groups

Employee Group: in this report, ‘Employee Group’ refers to two types of employee groups: Academic Staff and Professional & Support Staff ​

Employee Subgroup: this is a breakdown of the Employee Group, displaying the different types of academic, Professional and Support Staff – e.g. Associate Lecturers, Central Academic staff, Regional Academic staff (also known as Staff Tutors); Academic-related and support staff​

Senior Staff / Senior Level​

Senior Staff refers to employees in senior grade roles (SS0-SS5) or professor bands (PB1-PB3).​

Disclosure Rate

Disclosure rate refers to the number of people who have reported information about a protected characteristic. For example, the number of people who have disclosed information about their ethnicity, religion or whether or not they have one or more disabilities. ‘Prefer not to say’ is not included in the disclosure rate because when we refer to disclosure rate in EDI, we mean the revealing of an identity of a protected characteristic.​

Equality Scheme Targets​

The full Equality Scheme can be found in The Open University Equality Scheme 2022-2026. The Equality Scheme Staff KPIs are presented in the next page of this report.​

Higher Education Sector comparison benchmarks​

Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) data published by HESA in February 2026, in the ‘Who's working in HE?: Personal characteristics’ data release, relating to data from the 2024/25 academic year. ​

Who's working in HE?: Personal characteristics | HESA​

Where updated data on Sexual Orientation and Religion, and more detailed intersectional data by age could not be sourced, the last available data from 2022/23 has been referenced: ​

Higher Education Statistics Agency data published by Advance HE in the ‘Equality in Higher Education: Statistical Reports’ 2024 report, relating to data from the 2022/23 academic year. ​

Equality in higher education: statistical reports | Advance HE​