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Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education record 2014/15

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Central coding of Standard Industrial Classification (SIC)

Version 1.1 Produced 2016-03-17

Contents: Background | The process

Background

HESA undertook a fundamental review of the Destinations of Leaver from Higher Education (Early DLHE) record, for implementation in C11018. For details please see:

One of the outcomes was the agreement that SIC would be coded centrally. The aims of centralising the SIC coding being primarily consistency of coding and reducing burden on higher education providers (HEPs) by removing the need for this data to be locally coded.

The process

During the review it was anticipated that the SIC coding exercise would be undertaken after the DLHE data collection had closed. HESA will instead be passing batches of data to our SIC coding partner for matching and coding as it is received in order to be sure we are receiving data that can be coded. The results of coding will be available to HEPs during data collection as described below.

You will infer from the flow chart below that as more data is received the consistency of coding improves. Depending on the consistency and quality of coding we are able to achieve during collection HESA may still carry out a follow up re-coding exercise after the DLHE collection has closed. If so the results will be made available to HEPs.

SIC data will be available within 4 working days from when a committable transaction has been processed via the data collection system.

Full details of the process undergone before data are assigned a SIC code are detailed in the flowchart below.


Central SIC coding process

HESA will not enter into correspondence about the coding of individual records unless we believe there are serious errors in our SIC coding partner's methods or if the level of unknown codes are such that the data would be unfit for purpose. If a HEP requires a more accurate coding they will need to obtain more accurate employer information for that student and resubmit their data for recoding.


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