Back to C13061

Version 1.1 Produced 2013-08-20

The data returned in the fees and support fields should relate to the year for which prospective students are applying. Therefore, for the KIS to be published in September 2013 these fields should contain the planned fee and related information for the 2014/15 academic year.

Fee information should be returned for courses where some or all students pay fees, even if some students do not pay fees themselves (e.g. they are paid by the SHA/DH).

For courses that recruit through UCAS the fee and student support data will be taken from the UCAS course database, linked into the KIS data through the UCAS codes provided in KISCourse.UCASPROGID and KISCourse.UCASCOURSEID and updated regularly to reflect changes made by institutions to the fee and student support information held by UCAS.

A user guide to the UCAS system is available at www.ucas.com/he_staff/courses/2013changes.

Institutions are not able to provide fee data for UCAS courses directly through KIS to override the UCAS data. Validation will prevent this.

For courses that do not recruit through UCAS, institutions should complete the suite of fees and support fields directly in the KIS record. Where institutions have yet to set the fees for non-UCAS courses at the time of submission of their KIS file they should indicate this by setting KISCourse.FEETBC to 0. Institutions should make an updated KIS submission including fee details as soon as these are confirmed.

It is recognised that for some courses offered through partnership arrangements the fees may vary, in these cases separate KIS records should be returned to reflect the variants where different fees are charged.

For part-time courses the total fees for 120 credits should be given.

In the case that the fees for 120 credits of a part time course is equivalent to a full time course, KISCourse.KISMODE should be returned as 'BOTH'. If the fees vary for the equivalent 120 credits, two KIS should be returned, one with KISCourse.KISMODE returned as 'Full time', the other with KISCourse.KISMODE returned as 'Part time'.

The average maximum annual fee should be calculated by taking the expected maximum annual fee for each year and averaging over all years of the course. In calculating the average maximum fee institutions should ignore any planned increases to fees due to inflation. Where institutions intend to increase fees in line with inflation (should regulations allow) this should be flagged using codes 10 or 11 in KISCourse.VARFEE. Where the fee is not the same in all years then this should be flagged using codes 11 and 21 in KISCourse.VARFEE. Where the fee is fixed for all years this should be indicated using code 20 in KISCourse.VARFEE.

If institutions return non-integer (pounds and pence) values into Course collect for UCAS, the returned fees will be rounded down to the nearest pound for inclusion in KIS. Where institutions are returning fees directly to HESA then these should be rounded down to the nearest pound.

Example 1

If a course has fees of £6,000 in the first year and £9,000 in years two and three then the average maximum fee would be (£6,000+ £9,000+ £9,000) / 3 = £8,000. If the institution did not plan to increase fees in line with inflation then KISCourse.VARFEE would be 21, conversely if they were planned to increase with inflation then KISCourse.VARFEE would be 11.

Example 2

The domiciled fee fields (KISCourse.ENGFEE, KISCourse.NIFEE, KISCourse.SCOTFEE and KISCourse.WAFEE.) should give the average maximum annual fee for the course as a whole for domiciled student. The fees for placement years and study years abroad (indicated by KISCourse.SANDWICH or KISCourse.YEARABROAD = 2 - Compulsory) will be lower than for years spent at the home institution. This should be reflected in calculating the domiciled fee field to the extent that this is included within the learning and teaching methods. Therefore, where a course has a full year on placement the value in the domiciled fee field will typically be significantly below the fee for each year at the institution. For example, where a three year degree is advertised as having a sandwich year this will be reflected in the learning and teaching methods via a year with 100% placement, if the fees charged whilst at the institution are £9,000 per annum and the fee for the sandwich year is £1,000 then the value in the domiciled fee field would be £7,000 ((£9,000+£9,000+£1,000+£9,000)/4).

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