Huw Richards surveys the information currently available on top people's pay in institutions for 1993/94

In the notes which accompany the financial statement, balance sheet and auditors' report for 1994/95 and thereafter, institutions will be required to include details of the pay of vice chancellors and principals, plus any other employees receiving more than Pounds 50,000 a year.

Just over 80 institutions in the English higher education sector opted to disclose this information a year earlier than required. Institutions in the old university sector were less likely to do so - hence the absence from the table, left, of names such as Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, Nottingham, Sheffield and York.

This survey of vice chancellors' and principals' pay is drawn from publicly available information contained in the financial statements submitted by institutions together with their annual reports for the academic year 1993/94. Some of the people named have since left.

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As with all such tables, the figures have to be treated with some care. Disclosures are yet to be standardised.

In most cases institutions listed the "emoluments" of the vice chancellor, consisting of their salary and other benefits, and gave a separate figure for pension payments. For this reason these are the two basic elements used in the accompanying table, with institutions listed in the order of the total package revealed in the financial reports.

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Some institutions - for instance Leicester and Queen Mary and Westfield - went into greater detail, separating benefits from salary. But this applied in only a few cases.

Others, such as Westminster, City, London Guildhall and the Bolton Institute of Higher Education, provided a consolidated figure for all elements of the head of institution's financial package.