08/03 - July

Dear Colleagues

HESA Student Record 2009/10

HESA recently consulted institutions (Student circular 08/01) on a small number of changes that have been requested by Statutory Customers for the 2009/10 Student Record. Following consultation, HESA is now in a position to inform institutions of the agreed changes in principle. More detailed information will be provided shortly, once this has been finalised and queries raised by institutions in response to the consultation addressed.

NHS Bursaries

In order to support funding calculations and also to flag exemptions from the ELQ policy, HEFCE need to be able to identify courses that attract NHS bursaries. An additional field will be added to the Course entity in order to indicate courses for which students are eligible for NHS bursaries, either for the entire course, or for part of the course. (There are some medical and dental courses for which bursaries are available only for the later years.)

New qualifications

The Student Record collects the qualification aim of a course against a detailed coding frame. Since the specification of the 2007/08 record was finalised a number of new qualifications have emerged. In particular, a set of qualifications for teaching in the lifelong learning sector have been developed. For 2009/10 codes will be added to the coding frame for these qualifications and institutions will be required to use them.

Use of JACS

Currently institutions are only required to use the full 4-digit JACS coding in a subset of specialist subject areas. From 2009/10 institutions will be required to make appropriate use of the full 4-digit JACS coding in all subject areas. This is needed to future-proof work on strategically important and vulnerable subjects, so that as the landscape changes, it will be possible to assess the past performance of newly important subjects. This requirement will apply to both Courses and Modules. There will be some courses and modules where it remains appropriate to code at principal subject level, but others where a more detailed code should be used. So for example, a general Biology course would continue to be coded as C100, but a specific course/module in Biodiversity would be coded C181. Similarly, a generic Religious Studies course would be V600, but as specific Islamic Studies course would be V622.

Coverage of the Record - Students studying all or part of their course overseas

In response to the consultation institutions indicated the need for additional guidance in a number of areas relating to the boundary between the Student Record and the new Aggregate Overseas Record. HESA is working to resolve these issues with Statutory Customers in order to provide clear and complete information.

Initiatives with short term monitoring requirements

From time to time funders introduce initiatives (for example Life Long Learning Networks (LLNs) and Employer Engagement Co-funded Students) where, for a limited period, there is a requirement to track students who are recruited under the particular initiative.

In order to achieve this monitoring potential, a general purpose field will be added to the record, to which valid entries will be added to identify individual schemes as required. Multiple occurrences of this field will need to be returned where a student instance falls under more than one scheme.

For 2009/10 only institutions in England will be affected by this change, however, it is possible that other administrations may take advantage of this arrangement in future. The more detailed documentation will identify the schemes for 2009/10.

TDA-funded Student Associate Scheme (SAS) students

The TDA has requested that, for 2009/10, students participating in SAS programmes have certain information recorded on the Student Record. It is intended that this be achieved by defining a new Reduced Return, with the data to be supplied to HESA by the institution providing the SAS programme. In addition to a subset of existing fields (not yet finalised), two new fields will be added to the record for these students. These fields will record the reference number of the school where the student undertakes their SAS experience and also the subject of the placement (using JACS2). These fields will both be added to the Instance entity.

TDA-funded Subject Knowledge Enhancement (SKE) students

Since the consultation circular was launched the TDA has indicated a new requirement for additional information needed to monitor students registered on SKE courses. This will involve the addition of new fields to the record as follows:

To indicate the institution at which the SKE student will be taking their ITT course (Instance entity)

To record the number of SKE units completed (Course entity)

To identify where the course includes an overseas placement (Course entity)

To indicate for new ITT students whether they have completed an SKE course (EntryProfile entity).

Next steps

Following completion of ongoing discussions with Statutory Customers and other interested parties, full details of the changes set out above for implementation in 2009/10 will be published on the HESA web site, and record contacts notified in the usual way.

Yours Sincerely

C. Jane Wild

Director of Operations