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HE-BCI record 2017/18 - Introduction

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HE-BCI record 2017/18 - Introduction

Version 1.0 Produced 2018-09-13

Context

The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) has been established to undertake data collection and analysis about higher education in order to make possible consistent information provision about higher education throughout the UK, and to enable the universities and colleges and the funding councils to meet their obligations under relevant legislation. The formal responsibility for the provision of information to Ministers rests with the funding councils, who have agreed to engage HESA as their agent for this purpose.

HESA has the responsibility for integrating statistical data collection across all publicly funded UK higher education providers (HEPs) and subscribing alternative providers, within which there are different traditions and practices. The record has been constructed in such a way as to recognise this diversity. As far as possible, the aim has been to generate a single record that can be applied to all HEPs throughout the UK, irrespective of their different natures and funding regimes.

The coding manual sets out the requirements for the collection of data for the Higher Education - Business and Community Interaction (HE-BCI) collection. Throughout this manual, the term "funding council" should be interpreted as referring to the HEP's principal funding body, and therefore includes; the Office For Students for England (OfS), the Department for Education (DfE), the Scottish Funding Council for Scotland (SFC), the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW), the Department for the Economy (DfE) and Department for Communities (DfC) for Northern Ireland.

Record specific detail

Full details of the coverage of this record can be found in the coverage statement of the coding manual. This contains detailed information about the purpose and scope of each element of the return.

Data collected

The HE-BCI record is collected annually from all UK publicly funded higher education institutions (HEIs) and a number of alternative providers (APs), collectively referred to as higher education providers (HEPs) by HESA, in December in a workbook and a web form.

The HE-BCI record consists of two sections: the first (Part A) is a qualitative questionnaire, this will be collected by HESA as a web form. The second (Part B) is a set of quantitative data, which will be collected in a separate spreadsheet.

Data collection

All HESA records are collected on the basis of the HESA reporting period that determines the time period that the data being returned relates to. This ensures consistency across the data streams collected. The reporting period is from 01 August year 1 to 31 July year 2, for example, the 2000/2001 Student record was collected in respect of the activity which took place between 01 August 2000 and 31 July 2001.

Data must be returned using the templates provided by HESA for the relevant year. The HE-BCI (Part B) will be distributed by HESA as a spreadsheet template file to be completed and returned by HEPs. The template (in .xlsx format) for the return are made available for HEPs to download from the HE-BCI record home page. Once completed, these files should be returned using the data collection system. Information on submitting data to HESA is available from https://submit.hesa.ac.uk/help.


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