Thank you to colleagues who responded to my email about the funding of
Further Education within HEIs.  There is support for the idea of a special
interest group and I will be contacting those who responded with an
invitation to a meeting in the near future.

On the subject of the HESA generated 'shadow' funding claim almost all who
replied said that the shadow claim bore little resemblance to the real
thing.  Many had obviously spent considerable time and effort in tracing the
discrepancies.  I've had a discussion with Andrew Button of FEFC, who has
been in touch with several of you and he is aware of some commonality in the
causes of the discrepancies.  The main one seems to be the timescale, it is
not possible to record student achievements by the HESA submission data and
this leads to false calculation, not only of the achievement units but entry
and on programme because of the way the funding methodology works.  There
are obviously other technical factors at work, apparently the FEFC's
validation software doesn't work on the HESA data.

I suggested to Andrew that if the FEFC (understandably) requires individual
student data on the increasing number of FE students within HEIs; after all
we are an expanding part of the sector; they could consider taking a data
return from our funding program when we submit the audited claim, rather
than try to reconcile returns which are 'apples' and 'pears'.  Their current
approach seems to be to graft the 'apple on to the pear stock'

You will, I am sure, have your own thoughts on the practicality of this, and
other solutions.  Perhaps this could form the basis of our first meeting?


%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%