There has been a lot of talk about the OU finances, so I asked around to see if anyone had done any analysis. I couldn't find any, so I did my own! This is the result.
I took all the currently available information from the OU's public website (open.ac.uk/about), which gave me ten years' worth of information and developed a spreadsheet to summarise it all. It soon became clear that people were not much happier reading a spreadsheet than they were reading accounts, so I added a page of graphs and and another page of analysis. For those wanting more detail, I added my spreadsheets and a page of detailed notes.
My conclusion is that the OU is facing some financial difficulties, but they are not dire. Student numbers and income have remained remarkably stable over the past ten years, despite all the government changes in financing, and expenses have not increased dramatically.
Over the past five years, FutureLearn has cost the university about £25m, and will probably reach its approved ceiling of £30m by the end of the current year. The VC has said that it will move into profit next year (2018-19), but I will be surprised if it does more than break even. This may mean that it ceases to be a drain on finance, but I suspect it will need a bit more money to keep afloat.