Here's what I wrote to colleagues on the Alumni Relations and Development
JISCMAIL list about this:
I'd be interested to know, if you are at a HEFCE funded institution,
whether a letter dated 4 January 2005 from the Chief Executives of HESA and
HEFCE has found its way into your offices.
It announces that a survey which supplements the existing HESA data
collection exercise on graduate destinations is to be carried out with
effect from 2006. In order to reduce the "burden" on institutions HESA is
saying that it would carry out the survey centrally, and return
institution's own results to that institution.
While I sympathise absolutely with the desire on the part of the funding
councils and government to collect this information, I am deeply unhappy
with the idea that 3 years out we will be required to give a government
agency contact address details for our alumni.
It's not that I think that HESA will do anything it shouldn't with the
data, nor that there are any real Data Protection issues with this. For me
the issue is that I am concerned, especially if alumni have said "don't
pass your data on to anyone else", that we will be required to do exactly
that. And would you supply your information to a school or University if
you knew that it had a mandatory requirement to pass that data on to a
government agency. Especially with the introduction of higher fees and
loans, and the required associated mechanisms to collect outstanding debts,
it seems to me that this is a recipe for a decreased response rate in our
own data collection.
Any thoughts from anyone else?
___________________________
The reason I said there are no real DP issues with this is that the forms
that HESA have got us to send in the past to students in the First
Destination Survey apparently tell them that this may happen.
However, since writing the above to my colleagues, I have also put this
together with the things that we at Durham say to our alumni about how we
will use their data. One of those things says that we will never pass
information to anyone other than a Data Processor. And HESA clearly is not
a data processor in this case, but a Data Controller.
My suggested solution to the people at HESA, albeit with more work for us,
is that they supply us with the information, and we send it to the alumni
whom they wish to survey, enclosing a letter saying that we have been asked
by HESA to do this, and since the information is useful to the sector in
general we would be grateful if they would fill it in. I would want to make
very clear in the letter that they are under no obligation at all to fill
it in.
That is, of course, always assuming that from Alumni Relations and
Development point of view, we actually want to do this.
Adrian Beney
Deputy Director, Development and Alumni Relations
University of Durham
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