This field describes the institutional cost centres.

Compulsory for institutions in England. Compulsory for all institutions in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland that choose to make a return. Not required for institutions in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland that choose not to make a return.

For the purposes of the Institution profile record, assigning departments to academic cost centres should be done on the basis of the full-time equivalence of academic staff, rather than that of student numbers. This is consistent with the HEFCE guidance issued to institutions in England in their previous allocation exercise.

HEFCE established five fundamental criteria for grouping departments into cost centres, which are as follows:

• Similar cost structures for teaching
• Similar cost structures for research
• Similar patterns for capital expenditure
• Academic coherence in terms of the academic disciplines of staff
• Similar rates of funding for research grants and contracts.

Cost centres should comprise groups of staff whose attributes and activities collectively satisfy all the above criteria.

It is recognised that exceptionally some members of academic staff will be allocated across multiple cost centres, and that consequently, assigning a department to a cost centre or cost centres will be based on an estimate of staff full-time equivalences across cost centres. It is emphasized, however, that the proportions of departments allocated to cost centres should sum to 100% across the record.

When taking decisions about the attribution of staff to academic cost centres, consideration should be given to the correspondence with the HESA Finance record.

It is not expected that an institution will have activity in all academic cost centres.

For those institutions in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland wishing to make a return of academic department to cost centre mappings, the minimum requirement for such a return is that for each mapping, the fields AcademicCostCentres.ACCENTRE, AcademicCostCentres.DEPARTMENT, AcademicCostCentres.PROPACC and AcademicCostCentres.PROPDEPT must all be returned.

Academic cost centre data returned in the C13041 collection will be incorporated into COMMIT-stage validation for the C13051 Student, C13025 Staff and C13031 FSR with HE-BCI returns. It is recommended that colleagues responsible for the Institution profile record liaise with those responsible for these other collections, to ensure all required cost centres are returned.

To record cost centres.