Skip to main content

Staff 2016/17 - FTE during reporting period

Back to C16025

Staff 2016/17

Fields required from institutions in All fields

FTE during reporting period


return to field list
Typefield
Short nameCONFTE
Description

This field identifies the percentage of a full-time equivalent (FTE) year being undertaken by staff on the contract over the course of the reporting period

Applicable toEngland Northern Ireland Scotland Wales
Coverage

All contracts

Notes

This field should show the percentage of FTE for the year according to the contract of employment.

Reducing FTE

FTE does not need to be reduced to take account of temporary arrangements such as maternity leave, sick leave or other temporary arrangements for staff still eligible for inclusion in the record according to their contract of employment.

Clinical academics who as part of their contract, spend some of their time working outside of the HEP in the NHS should not have their FTE reduced to reflect the amount of time spent working in the NHS.

FTE should be reduced, however, to take account of a partial year worked by staff on contracts that started or ended during the reporting period.

Calculating FTE for a piece of work

Higher education providers (HEPs) will need to calculate an FTE for staff who are contracted to deliver a piece of work. In setting a rate of pay for the task the HEP will have taken a view as to the size of the task and therefore how long it might take. It is expected that this will be used as the basis for calculating the FTE.

Calculating FTE for staff working irregular hours

Where staff do not have regular hours/patterns of work, or are appointed on a very short-term basis, it may be difficult to calculate FTE. (It is suggested that HEPs estimate FTE for those contracts that involve working irregular hours using total salary information and hourly/daily pay rates).

Calculating FTE for staff working term-time only

The FTE for term-time only staff should be reduced to account for the fact that these staff only work part of the year. There is no single definition of term-time only, as the number and length of terms may differ from one HEP to another. HEPs are therefore advised to use a definition applicable to their HEP. For example, if there are 3 terms of 10 weeks in duration, the FTE for full-time term-time only staff should be reduced by 30/52=0.58, compared to similar staff working with the same intensity but for a full-year.

Staff seconded to a post within the reporting HEP

Where staff are seconded within the HEP, any activity on posts should be returned, so where the secondment is for all of their time, the contract fields should contain information about the seconded post only, and where the secondment is for part of their time only, the contract entity should contain two records if the HEP issues two contracts.

Staff seconded to a post at another HEP

For secondments to another HEP the reporting HEP should reduce the FTE (to zero if the secondment is for the whole year) and the recipient HEP should return the contract(s) they have issued.

Staff seconded to a post outside the higher education sector

For those seconded to a post outside the higher education sector, the reporting HEP should only return the details of the contract they have issued. The HEP should reduce the FTE (to zero if the secondment is for the whole year).

Staff on sabbatical

For staff on sabbatical, HEPs should reduce the FTE (to zero if the sabbatical is for the whole year).

The length of this field is a maximum of 5 characters, however the move to XML enables data to be returned with or without leading zeros or the decimal place, e.g. '005.0', '5.0' or '5' are equally acceptable. Where an FTE value is returned with decimal places, it must be rounded to the nearest 0.1 in order to conform to the five character limit.

Examples

Full-time staff

A contract to work full-time for twelve months of the year would be shown as 100 in this field.

  • Full-time staff on maternity leave during the whole reporting period would be shown as 100 in this field because the FTE in the contract should not be reduced for temporary arrangements such as maternity leave.
  • A contract to work full-time for six months of the year would be shown as 50 in this field because FTE is reduced to take account of partial years worked.

A member of staff employed on separate higher education provider (HEP) and NHS contracts (e.g. A + B contracts) works for example eleven sessions a week, five at the HEP (45.45% FTE) and six for the NHS (54.55% FTE). This should be shown as 100 in this field as the FTE for clinical academics should not be reduced to reflect the amount of time spent working in the NHS.

Hourly paid staff

The FTE for a member of staff who works 6 hours per year should be calculated by making a comparison based on the standard set for full-time staff within the HEP.

HEPs may set a standard full-time FTE’s hours worked per year in a similar way to the example below.

If a full-time member of staff works 37 hours per week and has 25 days leave entitlement plus 8 days bank holidays then they will work 1679.8 hours a year:

  • (hours worked per week/days in working week)*(total working days in a year - no. of days leave and bank holiday entitlement) = hours worked per year
  • (37/5)*(52*5-25-8) = 1679.8 hours worked per year for the full-time FTE.

Following on from this, 6 hours per year compared to the standard of 1679.8 hours per year (for full-time staff) would result in an FTE of 0.4%, calculated as follows:

  • (hours worked per year/standard FTE hours per year)*100 = reduced hours FTE
  • (6/1679.8)*100 = 0.357185. Rounded to one decimal place = 0.4.

It is known that HEPs approach the calculation of hourly paid staff contract hours in different ways. Some HEPs proportion annual leave and bank holidays (as per the example above), whilst others add a percentage to the hourly paid rate for annual leave and bank holidays and expect staff to take their leave outside the contracted hours. Consequently, HEPs will have to calculate their non-standard rate based on their specific contractual circumstances.

In the following example, again 6 hours per year are worked, but the hours are uprated by 10% to account for the holidays which hourly paid staff are expected to take outside their contracted hours. Holiday or bank holiday entitlement would not, therefore, be deducted:

  • (hours worked per year + (10%))/(standard FTE hours per year without full-time FTE holiday entitlement deducted)*100 = reduced hours FTE
  • (6+(6/100*10))/(52*37)*100 = 0.343035. Rounded to one decimal place = 0.3

An FTE of zero should not occur when making such comparisons. In general the standard that is set for full-time should be no more than 2080 hours per year (40 hours per week), therefore staff who work for 1 hour per year, will have an FTE of 0.05%, which, when rounded, will be 0.1% FTE.

Quality rules
Quality rules relating to this field are displayed here.
Reason required

To estimate the total size of the workforce and enable resource comparisons with other HESA records

Part of
Field length5
Minimum occurrences1
Maximum occurrences1
Schema components
Element: CONFTE
Data type: PercentType
OwnerHESA
Version1.0

Contact Liaison by email or on +44 (0)1242 388 531.