Dear Jessica,

These are my own views and not necessarily those of any other members 
of the Heinz Group, although I'm copying them in on my reply

Thanks for the response - although I'm somewhat disappointed and 
surprised that intellectual property has been dragged out as a reason 
to withhold data.  The spirit of cooperation and freedom of information
has degenerated into "We share the information we want to share<HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS>."  So 
we have to content ourselves with checking HESA data and resign 
ourselves to the possibility that a flawed methodology is being used to
construct league tables giving misleading results.  Incidentally, we 
weren't even querying the methodology at this stage - we were just 
asking for our own numbers that you calculated to place us in the bands.

You place great emphasis on the consultation process and chastise us 
like naughty schoolchildren for failing to make use of it.  I have 
three comments on that.  Firstly, how can you comment on a process that
is not fully explained?  Secondly, release of the information which we 
require would no doubt raise further issues worthy of discussion.  
Finally, your memory on the consultation process is somewhat selective.
At the league table event that was held last November we were told that
banding information would be released in future.  It has taken a 
considerable amount of time, and then only in response to a massive 
groundswell of opinion across the sector, for the Guardian to release 
such information as it has thus far.

On the subject of banding we still require the number of institutions 
included in each band.  Are you prepared to release this?  If not, I 
intend to ask members of the Heinz group to share out the laborious 
task of finding it out for ourselves from your web site.


Regards,

Brian



On Fri, 28 Jul 2006 17:13:23 +0100 [log in to unmask] 
wrote:

> 
> Dear all,
> 
> As promised , attached is an Excel spreadsheet containing the 
additional
> information requested by Brian Oldham on behalf of the Heinz group of
> universities.
> 
> The team at Brunel  has put together the band information for each 
subject
> - top and bottom.  The maximum values are given for all performance
> indicators. SSR has both maximum and minimum values. All other 
performance
> indicators use 0 as the lowest value to calculate the bands.
> 
> We will not, however, be giving the absolute scores for each 
university for
> each subject. This is part of the intellectual property of the 
Guardian and
> Campus Pi. In a competitive industry like ours, sharing the 
methodology of
> a key product like this is counter-productive from our point of view.
> 
> We share information we want to share through the newspaper and 
website and
> have always been happy to discuss the methodology of the university 
tables
> during the designated consultation process.
> 
> Both ourselves and HESA gave full warning to all universities about 
our
> consultation 'window' which totalled around 4 months at the beginning
of
> this year.
> 
> We made it clear then that this was universities' best chance to 
discuss
> the process with us and that we would be less sympathetic after the 
event.
> Many of the universities on this list failed to contact us then 
(despite
> also being asked to do so by UUK) and so we feel within our rights to
try
> to bring this process to a close for this year.
> 
> Regards,
> EducationGuardian.co.uk
> 
> 
> (See attached file: HEINZSubjectBand_Data.xls)
> 
> 
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-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-oo-o-o-o-o-
Brian Oldham
Management Data Analyst
Finance Department
King's College London
Room 7.22
James Clerk Maxwell Building
57 Waterloo Road
London  SE1 8WA
Tel:  020 7848 3850
Fax:  020 7848 3356