My secretary sent this note out on Friday, as an attachment.  For increased
clarity, the full text is given below.  I will respond as quickly as
possible to those who have mailed me individual queries about the exercise



Colleagues

I was at a meeting at the Student Loans Company last Thursday (8 April), and
asked for clarification of a number of problems I have had in sorting out
the courses and terms information they require.  Could I emphasise that, if
you have not already done sent this back, you should do so within the next
couple of days; my particular concern is that if higher education fails to
deliver on this, the SLC and the LEAs will have some scope for blaming
higher education when loan cheques are not delivered to our students on
time.

I hope this note is not too late to be useful; I have been off sick since
last Thursday.

The issues were:

Franchised courses
It is the responsibility of the franchising institution to return course
information and term dates for franchised courses.  For this purpose
colleges to which courses are franchised should be treated as campuses of
the franchising institution.  A franchising arrangement is generally
identified by the fact that the funding from HEFCE etc comes initially  to
the franchising institution with an appropriate amount being passed on to
the franchisee.

College short name
The examples given are unfortunate; in general the short name should be the
name by which your institution can most easily be found in an alphabetical
list (eg a drop-down look-up table).  Bangor is NOT to be regarded as a
campus of the University of Wales; the constituent colleges of the
University of Wales should each send in their own return.

Course code
The SLC six figure course code cannot be changed in the software.  If you
add courses, you may make up your own codes, which should normally be the
UCAS course code where one exists.

Duration
The length of the course should be given in whole years.  Round up if
necessary.

Course closed
You WILL need to add details of any courses for which you will have second
year students in 1999-2000, even if it is no longer recruiting.  Otherwise
students on these courses will have trouble getting past the initial
eligibility stage

Method of attendance
Please note that the new Student Support Regulations refer (confusingly) to
modern language courses with a year spent abroad as 'sandwich courses', and
such courses should be returned as sandwich (SW)

Term date profiles
Note that the term date profiles only work if all the years of a course have
the same term dates.

Freshers weeks
The information given in the notes about the treatment of Freshers Weeks is
WRONG.  If the student is REQUIRED to attend your introductory period
(whatever you call it), it is part of the period for which the student can
be funded, and the dates SHOULD be included in  those of the first
term/semester.

Study abroad and placements
'New Award' students going abroad for 1999-2000 will receive their first
loan instalment by BACS in August.  The same general timetable will also
apply to those who will be out on placement at the beginning of the first
term/semester.  Information about this will be obtained by the LEAs direct
from the students concerned, and their assessments will be flagged
accordingly.  Information about study abroad and placements is therefore not
being collected with this course/term data.

UCAS course codes
For those institutions which wish to map the data they supplied at Christmas
onto the new format, the SLC has supplied a look-up table giving the UCAS
code and SLC six figure code for each course listed on the CD ROM.  This has
been sent by e-mail; if you have not received it, email to [log in to unmask]

UCAS Users Only
Some courses with the same UCAS code can be followed either as a full time
(3 year) course or as a sandwich (4 year) course.  In such cases use the
notation FT;SW



Given that I have not been able to write out any separate notes on
transferring the data collected at Christmas to the new data format, I
suggest that anyone who is having difficulties sends me an email, and I will
do my best to help.

Without wanting to labour the point too much, it really is important that we
get this course and term date information back to the SLC within the next
few days; if we do not, there is a real risk of our being blamed for later
problems, and a genuine risk that our students will not bet their loan money
on time.


Roger Clark
Academic Registrar
University of Reading



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