HESA will use BOS for its 2015/16 Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE) survey.

Originally developed at the University in 2002, BOS is an easy-to-use online service that allows non-technical users to develop, deploy, and analyse surveys. Its new release follows a redevelopment, using reinvested BOS income, with new features requested by users.

BOS is already licensed by 85% of UK universities, and is used for national benchmarking surveys such as the Higher Education Academy's Postgraduate Research Experience Survey and Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey, as well as Vitae's Careers in Research Online Survey and Principal Investigators and Research Leaders Survey.

These national surveys exploit a popular feature of BOS that lets institutions each run the same core survey and then anonymously compare their results against those of other institutions in the wider benchmarking group or specific subgroups, such as the Russell Group and regional groups like GW4.