03/01 - March

Dear Colleagues

STAFF RECORD REVIEW – SECOND CONSULTATION

HESA issued a first Staff Record Review consultation circular in November 2002 (Staff Circular 02/05). We would like to take this opportunity to thank all those institutions (over 70) that responded to that consultation and so provided valued and constructive input to the review process. The Review Group has now considered these responses and formulated a second consultation. This second consultation both confirms decisions now made by the Group on a number of fundamental issues and also provides the opportunity for institutions to comment on many more detailed aspects of the record specification. To that end, this consultation includes a draft coding manual for the new record.

Coverage

In the first consultation institutions commented on two specific issues – whether to include all staff regardless of FTE or impose a 10% FTE cut-off/minimum for inclusion, and also the need to include staff with contract of service.

Institutions were almost equally divided in response to the question of whether to include all staff in the new record or only those with an FTE greater that 10%. The Review Group considered this question again in the light of this, of the comments institutions had made, and also of the indications given of the proportion of staff likely to be excluded from the record if a 10% cut-off was implemented. The Group agreed that a 10% cut-off was too high and that in some institutions it was likely to result in the exclusion of significant numbers of staff. This would have implications for both equal opportunities and resource monitoring, and may mean that aggregate returns would have to be continued to ensure that complete data were available. The Group also recognised that FTE is a difficult concept, one not possible to define accurately, and that having a cut-off specified in such terms was likely therefore to result in inconsistent data.

The Group did recognise that institutions may not be in a position to provide detailed data about individuals with whom they have only minimal contact. It was therefore agreed that within the record a minimum data set would be identified for those who work for an institution for less than the equivalent of one day during the reporting period.

Most of the institutions responding to the consultation expressed concern about the possibility of having to return data about individuals with a contract for services, because in most cases these individuals were not regarded as employees and hence were not included in personnel systems. The Review Group acknowledged these difficulties and looked again at the legislative background that had led to the original proposal to include such individuals. The Group have agreed to take further expert advice (from UCEA, ECU, UPA and SCOP, amongst others) on the definition of ‘an employee’ and so define the coverage of the new record to include ‘all those legally identified as employees’. It is HESA’s view that this definition is likely to be broad enough to include some individuals with contracts for services. This expert advice will be sought in parallel with this second consultation. It is also intended that this advice should clarify the responsibilities of institutions with regard to staff employed by companies whose accounts are consolidated into those of the institution.

Structure

The first consultation presented two possible options for the structure of the new staff record, and specifically requested that institutions choose between them. Responses indicated that the majority of institutions preferred a normalised record structure, using separate tables for reporting person attributes and contract attributes.

Collecting the data in this way will allow counts to be made of the number of people employed in the UK HE sector, together with their attributes, also recording the details of the individual contracts under which they are employed, providing a comprehensive information resource for analysis purposes. It can thus be seen that the draft coding manual included with this consultation reflects the unanimous decision of the Review Group that a normalised structure will be introduced for the New Staff Individualised Record.

The staff record normalised structure is comprised of separate person and contract tables. So, each person record included in the person table may be linked to one or more contract records in a one-to-many relationship; there will be no duplication or redundancy of data. For staff holding a single contract, this novel structure represents a split in the staff record data fields, with one table holding personal attributes and one other holding contract attributes. However there is flexibility to allow for the reporting of multiple contracts held by individuals in any reporting period.

Contracts

Statutory data users other than those in England, together with HESA, and other national bodies (e.g. DoH, ECU, HESDA, UCEA, NATFHE and the AUT) with an interest in staff data need information on multiple staff contracts. HEFCE and DfES however have no requirement for data to be collected about multiple contracts held by individuals. Therefore, institutions in England can choose to return the detail of only one of the contracts held. If an institution (in England) elects to return only one contract per staff member, then that institution will be required to: declare this methodology, apply this methodology for the whole of the institution, and apply a standard algorithm to derive the contract details which will be similar to that illustrated in Annex A to the first consultation (ref. Circular 02/05). HESA will then have to use the same algorithm in order to provide sector-wide analysis at a single person record level. In cases where individuals do hold multiple contracts in any reporting period HESA would however encourage English institutions to return the detail of each of the multiple contracts to facilitate the analysis of consistent data across the UK.

Nevertheless HESA recognises that there are a small number of institutions for which delivery of data in a normalised manner may be difficult because of constraints imposed by their existing internal information management systems. For this reason it is HESA’s intention to discuss with these institutions individually what transition arrangements are necessary to allow them to adopt the normalised structure.

As the normalised data structure for the New Individualised Staff Record is novel, after a period following its introduction it is seen to be beneficial to review the outcomes of returning data in this way.

Content

As already indicated, a draft coding manual for the new record is enclosed with this Circular. There are a significant number of quite detailed issues to which we wish to draw attention. Record contacts are therefore advised to review the whole of the draft coding manual and feed back any comments they might have. There are, however, a number of more generic issues that are presented below.

Full-time Equivalent (FTE)

The concept of FTE is embedded in this and other data streams, but it is widely acknowledged that FTE is a difficult concept to define, and so is not currently used consistently across the sector. HESA and other data users are therefore keen to find some measure of ‘effort’ or ‘contracted work’ that allows consistent comparison within and between institutions, but are not sure that FTE is necessarily the right or the best way to do this. Other options include the use of hours/days or even weeks as quantitative units of measure. Institutions are invited to offer alternative options for a suitable measure.

Clinical Academics

HESA has worked closely with representatives from the Department of Health, the Council for the Heads of Medical Schools and the Council of Deans and Heads of UK University Faculties for Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting in order to identify an appropriate set of information to be collected about those academic staff who also have responsibilities within the NHS. This coverage is not just limited to those working in medicine and dentistry, but also includes those working in nursing, midwifery and other allied health professions. It has been possible to include additional codes in some fields in the record to allow collection of the data required, such that the specific extra fields relating to only clinical academics have been limited to four. Those institutions with medical and dental schools and/or faculties of nursing or health studies are asked to pay particular attention to and comment on these additional fields as they review the draft coding manual.

Salary and Grade information

The review group is aware that negotiations are currently ongoing with the aim of agreeing new pay and grading structures for use across the sector, but also mindful that institutions might choose to negotiate local arrangements. Therefore at this stage it is not possible to identify the detail of a coding frame for the grade field; this will therefore be completed once the negotiations have been concluded. A suite of three fields is proposed in order to collect salary information, with two out of the three needing to be completed for each contract held by an individual. For each contract it is proposed that a monetary value for the total monies paid for that contract during the reporting year be returned. Additionally, for those contracts where a nationally negotiated salary applies the salary point at a reference date will be returned, and for those contracts where locally agreed salaries apply the basic salary at the reference date will be returned.

Activities and cost centres

It has long been HESA’s intention that introduction of the New Inividualised Staff Record (NISR) should dispense with the need to collect either of the existing aggregate returns (the Aggregate Staff Record {ASR} and the New Aggregate Staff Record {NASR}). In order to allow discontinuation of the ASR the new record needs to capture ‘staff effort’ by cost centre for all staff. In the earlier consultation institutions were asked to specify the number of cost centres they would need in order to allocate staff effort in the way they currently do for the ASR. The responses from institutions suggested that between one and a maximum of six cost centres would be necessary.

The activity and cost centre fields included in the new record are designed to capture the types of activity for which a contract was established, and the relevant cost centres to which these activities are charged. For many contracts there may only be one activity charged to one cost centre, but for others there may be more than one activity charged to one or more cost centres or a single activity charged to more than one cost centre. The fields included in the contract table of the new record allow for up to six combinations of activity and cost centre, reflecting the maximum indicated by institutions responding to the earlier consultation. It is however anticipated to be unlikely that many staff will have contracts that cover such a wide range of activity.

The fields are set up in groups of three – an activity, the related cost centre and the proportion of the contract to which this activity/cost centre combination relates. There are six groups of three fields, but it is likely that many of these will be blank for most staff.

Institutions are again invited to comment on this proposal, in particular those institutions that indicated a need for up to six cost centres may want to review this requirement in the light of the further explanation above.

Additionally, given that the coverage of the new record will include staff employed in a wide range of different jobs within institutions, a way is needed to categorise jobs that can be applied in all institutions. For introduction of the New Aggregate Staff Record in 2001/02 it was decided that this categorisation would be based on the Standard Occupational Coding (SOC) frame developed by the Office for National Statistics. HESA thus commissioned development of a version of SOC that directly reflected the range of occupations undertaken in the higher education sector, and it is this classification that will be used in the New Individualised Staff Record.

Coding frames

A number of the data items included in the new record will be familiar to institutions as they form part of the current staff individualised record. However, many of the coding frames have been altered in a number of ways:

• Codes and language have been updated to reflect changes in the sector
• Coding frames have been simplified where the detail currently collected is not seen as necessary
• Coding frames have been expanded to reflect the wider coverage of the record beyond academic staff.

Status of fields

The record has been defined in such a way that all fields must be completed for all staff, i.e. there will be no ‘blank’ fields in the data returned to HESA. However, not all the information will be collected for every member of staff. Therefore default values have been included in a number of fields and their use defined.

Data Protection and the Use of salary data

Individualised staff data is covered by the Data Protection Act 1998, even though names are not included with the data. This is because the records are so detailed that in some cases it is possible to identify individuals. Although salary data is not classified as sensitive data under the Act, all users are aware of the delicate nature of the data. Accordingly, all the data controllers involved (HESA and statutory data users) take extra care in the management and use of this data.

In the earlier consultation institutions were asked whether they were content that actual rather than banded salaries be made available for analytical purposes. The majority of institutions who responded on this point were content that actual salary data should be released by HESA for analytical purposes. The availability of actual salary information enables more accurate analysis of the data and so leads to better representation of the results of that analysis. HESA wishes to provide assurance to institutions in respect of the use of salary data.

There are a variety of legitimate interests in staff salary data. These can however be categorised into either statutory or non-statutory interest. The statutory data users (government education departments and HE funding agencies) have offered the following re-assurance in respect of their use of staff salary data.

Statutory data users

Statutory data users in receipt of data sets from HESA are bound by data protection legislation (as are all users) and take their responsibilities very seriously, for example, access to individualised data is restricted to those carrying out relevant data analysis. Also great care is taken to ensure that data published by statutory users does not inadvertently enable individuals to be identified. The majority of analysis is carried out by statutory users is in-house, but when analysis is contracted to third parties, it is under strict terms and conditions that preclude use for all but the specified purpose and also require that data are destroyed after use for this purpose.

In addition to these existing arrangements, the statutory data users propose to adopt even more restrictive controls over use of actual salary data. All analysis using this data will be carried out in-house, and will in no circumstances be contracted to third parties. Further, some of the statutory users intend that salary data will be stored in a separated data set from the other staff details, and will not be routinely accessible to all their data analysts. In these circumstances, access to this data will only be given in order to carry out specific work.

HESA

HESA’s own use of data for different purposes in analysis and publication can also be categorised as either statutory or non-statutory. As with all users of staff data, as previously stated, HESA is bound by the Data Protection Act 1998 in its processing of data. In addition HESA applies rigorous internal controls to the use of data; controls which are particularly stringent in the case of ethnicity, disability and staff salary information.

Non-statutory use of data within HESA is either in HESA publications or ad hoc data supply through HESA's Information Provision Service. Statistics derived from salary data are not at present included in any HESA publications. Salary data is used in the derivation of statistics for some ad hoc enquiries but will NEVER be supplied at individual level. Supply of statistics derived from salary data is restricted to those organisations that will use the data for planning or promotion of education, academic or other educational research; the main users of this data are currently the academic staff unions. All users must sign up to strict terms and conditions of use of data, including purpose, security and publication restrictions. In particular, no users of HESA data may use it to attempt to identify individuals.

The statistics commonly requested that currently are derived from salary data fall into two types; average salary and staff numbers in the present salary bands (of £5,000). Currently average salaries are calculated only for full-time staff of known salary, and the average is suppressed if there are 7 or less staff in that category. All published data must follow the HESA rounding strategy in which all numbers of individuals are rounded to the nearest 5. Banded salaries are not sufficient for the purpose of analysing changes in salaries from year to year. The understanding of such changes for different groups of staff is important to a number of policy areas, including informing equal opportunities issues and pay negotiations. It is anticipated therefore, with the introduction of the New Individualised Staff Record that in future, subject to the assurances given above, the results of analysis of actual salary data will be available without being banded.

Any data to be supplied at institution level for high profile use will be presented for institutional preview (on the Data Dissemination System WebPages after notification to the HESA-PR jiscmail list) before it is supplied to the client. In particular the aforementioned data for the staff unions is made available in this way. More information about HESA's use of data can be found on the HESA website in the Data Protection section (www.hesa.ac.uk/dataprot) or the Information Provision section (www.hesa.ac.uk/products/adhoc).

Staff Identifiers

Many institutions were of the view that the proposed new system for exchange of staff identifiers was not workable, particularly in the timescales proposed. The Review Group recognised the need to improve the use of the staff identifier to enable career tracking, but concluded that the need for the system proposed in the first consultation circular was not yet proven. Instead, the Group suggested that a number of other initiatives be tried.

To this end, HESA will re-instigate issue of staff record contacts with a list of the contacts at other institutions and will keep this up to date. Institutions will be required to provide record contact details specifically for this operational purpose. Additionally, institutions will be encouraged to provide staff who are leaving an institution with details of their staff identifier, which they can pass to a future employed within the sector.

Further, HESA will be implementing a muster approach to the staff record, i.e. those staff who do not have a ‘date left’ and ‘reason for leaving’ returned in the record for one year will be expected to appear on the record for the following year.

It will however be necessary after a period following introduction of the new record to review the effectiveness of these proposed methods in improving linking and tracking.

Data Quality

HESA has invested considerable resource in the development of DQA processes and procedures over the past decade. When designing a new record it is necessary to ensure that we are able to provide and support the necessary tools and processes to deliver the standards of DQA that the users of HESA data have come to expect.

Quality assurance of the novel data structure for the New Individualised Staff Record will rely heavily on checks between the two data files. This type of validation is already used in the student data collections, but the new staff record will see an increased role for this type of check (second stage validation).

The first stage of validation will operate as it does now; each of the tables (Person and Contract) will be subjected to checks that assure the structure of the file, the validity of the entries in each field, and the relationship between fields within that file. These checks will, as now, be contained within validation kits that institutions download from the HESA web site and run against their data before the data collection exercise begins.

The current staff record collections includes only some basic ‘second level’ validation checks – mainly focused on ensuring that personal details are consistent when more that one record is returned for an individual. These checks can only be undertaken once an institution has submitted all of its data to the HESA data collection system.

The new structure will require a greater range of second stage validation checks (both within each table and between the two tables) that require the data to be complete before they can be applied. HESA is undertaking developmental work to determine how this type of check might best be undertaken by institutions before data submission.

Examples of the type of check that will need to be applied in the second stage of validation include:

• Ensuring there are no duplicate Person records within an institution
• Ensuring that each Person record has at least one Contract record
• Ensuring that each Contract record has an associated Person record
• Ensuring that the relevant personal attributes are collected for different types of staff.

Action Required

Institutions are invited to comment on any of the issues raised in this Circular. HESA would specifically welcome comments on the detail of the draft coding manual, in particular, an alternative to FTE, and pointers as to where institutions would like to see additional advice and guidance added to the manual to enable better completion of the return.

Please send your comments to Catherine Benfield (catherine.benfield@hesa.ac.uk) by 11 April 2003.

Next Steps

The Review Group will consider the outcome of this second consultation, together with the expert advice sought on coverage, before recommendations are presented to the HESA Board at the end of May. Final operational documentation will then be issued to institutions before the start of the 2003/04 reporting period to which the new record relates.

Yours sincerely


C Jane Wild
Director of Operations

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