With apologies for cross-posting
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Dear Colleagues,
MEASURING H.E./ BUSINESS LINKS
Many of you are in institutions recently awarded grants from HEFCE’s Higher
Education Reach-out to Business and the Community Fund, or through the
complementary measures for Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland - or are
preparing applications for the second round. HEFCE’s second call, circular
00/05, Annex B, sets out the arrangements for monitoring and evaluation -
mainly by reviewing progress toward each institution’s own targets. But
HEFCE also intends to aggregate returns, in the hope of showing measurable
increases in, for example, numbers of work experience placements, and
income from research and consultancy commissioned by industry. And it will
soon be conducting a further national survey of HE-industry links, on the
lines of that by PREST in 1998.
Furthermore, in looking beyond the current HEROBAC funding, the Minister
for Science, Lord Sainsbury, said to the AURIL conference last month ‘The
next step should I think be to make this third stream of funding a
permanent one alongside research and teaching, and to develop a set of
metrics which measures outputs and which can be used as a means of
allocating funds. In this way we can give universities a choice of how they
develop.’
The data which are collected for monitoring and in the national survey must
therefore be robust and fairly portray all institutions’ interactions with
business and the community. To complement work already done in-house, and
to inform the brief for the national survey, HEFCE has commissioned me to
undertake a quick study addressing, principally, the questions:
a. What types of activity, within the broad field of HE/business
interaction, leading to measurable outcomes, are currently undertaken
within a reasonable number of HEIs and might desirably be covered by the
proposed survey.
b. The extent to which HEIs are currently able to quantify these activities
and outcomes (including data already being collected for existing returns,
and new sub-areas where systematic collection of data might be possible);
and the practicability of collecting and analysing these data in a national
survey (both in a survey on the PREST model and by routine return), with
particular regard to the costs of compliance falling on institutions.
In the few weeks available, I will be visiting a few, representative,
institutions, but I want to collect the views from a wider constituency of
practitioners, hence this message to several relevant Mailbase lists. I am
not soliciting institutional responses; I will not attempt to construct
statistics from replies; respondents will not be identified in my report to
HEFCE, without their agreement; and you can choose to reply to me alone or
to the list.
The current working list of possible quantitative indicators is:
Income generation activity
1. Income from business and HMG/EC programmes for knowledge transfer
activities including collaborative R&D and contract R&D, consultancy, sales
of intellectual property volume/value (e.g. patents executed, copyrights,
licensing)
2. Volume of and income from CVE and CPD activity
3. Turnover/equity value and number of companies wholly or partly owned by
university plus spin-offs plus companies in incubation
Evidence of staffing provision
4. Numbers of staff sponsored by business and number/person years of staff
secondments to and from business
Evidence of student participation
5. Number/person years of student placements in business and number/person
years of students sponsored by industry
6. Level of graduate recruitment into business
The questions then are:
1. do these indicators adequately capture the variety of your institution’s
current and prospective activity in links with business, particularly if
they were to be used a means of allocating funds?
2. if not, which activities are not captured, and what other indicators do
you propose?
3. for both the indicators listed above (some of which can be derived from
existing HESA returns) and those you propose, how should they be broken
down, and what comments do you have on data definitions, robustness, ease
of collection, costs of compliance, etc.?
Early replies greatly appreciated!
Yours sincerely,
John Farrant
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John Farrant, UNIVERSITAS Higher Education Management Consultants,
75 Paddock Lane, Lewes, East Sussex, BN7 1TW, UK
voice & fax +44 (0) 1273 478 133 email <[log in to unmask]>
Visit our website at <www.universitas.u-net.com>
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