Thanks for the info, I've had a reply from 3 or 4 people now and will draw
up a list after Easter of interested parties
My experience of the HESA/FEFC data matches yours, particularly with regard
to the achievement units. We have traced the differencies to course level
but with over 11,000 records I dont want to do it at student level unless
the work will be worth the effort. So your information is helpful in
suggesting some possible areas to explore.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: CHRIS E M HOLMES [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: 01 April 1999 12:59
> To: [log in to unmask]; [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Further Education within Universities
>
> Janet -
>
> I did much of the work at the University of Derby on our 1997-98 FE claim.
> I spoke to the FEFC before we invited the auditors in and was told that
> they would not be sending us the "reports from the funding program
> generated from...HESA" they mention in the Supplement to Circular 98/25 (p
> 12 para 54).
>
> We went ahead on this basis and prepared our claim using our own internal
> spreadsheet. We were happy, the auditors were happy, and then lo and
> behold a summary of units derived from our HESA data arrived a fortnight
> later! No, it didn't bear any relation to the claim we had just submitted
> (being considerably short of our claim).
>
> Intrigued by this, I got the electronic version from the FEFC and compared
> it to our claim student by student. It was not easy to identify any
> pattern to the discrepancies in many cases as the individual student
> entries were not broken down into unit types, but some patterns did emerge
> which I list below:
>
> no childcare units were included (not surprising, as this information is
> not collected by HESA);
>
> some courses were missing most of the achievement units (this is probably
> due to the discrepancy between the HESA collection date and the
> notification of some of the course results);
>
> some students were obviously not getting entry units;
>
> many students appeared to be getting on-programme units for too few
> periods; and
>
> some (listed!) programmes appeared to be getting units at the wrong rate.
>
> Please let me know if you would like any further explanation as to how I
> arrived at any of these conclusions.
>
> Doubtless it'll all be better next year (the mantra I've chanted at this
> time of year for the past six years)!
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