The name of the department from which staff are mapped to HESA cost centres.

Compulsory for higher education providers (HEPs) in England. Compulsory for all HEPs in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland that choose return the academic department to HESA cost centre mapping. Not required for HEPs in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland that choose not to return the mapping.

This field should record the name of the department within a HEP in which a staff member might normally be based.

HEPs should return the full name and not abbreviations, where available, of the department in this field.

The definition of a department should be consistent with that set out in the Coverage document.

Up to 200 characters may be returned.

Valid characters

The question of valid characters is significant in this field since many names include characters with accents and other diacritics that are not supported by the standard ASCII characterset. The valid characterset available for this field is consistent with HESA usage in free text fields in other records.

• The general policy is to support all Latin-based characters for names, addresses and general text fields, but not non-Latin characters.
• All Unicode code charts for Latin characters are supported. These are Basic Latin (excluding the C0 control characters), Latin-1 (excluding the C1 control characters), Latin Extended A, Latin Extended B and Latin Extended Additional. This set corresponds to Unicode code points U+0020 to U+007E, U+00A0 to U+024F and U+1E00 to U+1EFF.
• Schemas are built in such a way that an individual project can further restrict the set if required.

The character set chosen will support Welsh and Gaelic languages as well as all European and most other languages using a Latin-based character set.

The Unicode charts that list each of the characters in this range can be found on the Unicode web site. The specific sets that are defined here are shown in the following PDF documents:

• Basic Latin
• Latin-1
• Latin Extended A
• Latin Extended B
• Latin Extended Additional

For those HEPs in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland wishing to make a return of academic department to HESA 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.

To allow higher education providers (HEPs) to return information on their organisational structure.