Thanks Mike, it’s good to know I’m not alone and it’s a very useful comment about cutting the list down to those of primary interest.

 

Regards,

 

Elaine.

 

 

Hi Elaine,

 

We have encountered this very same issue.

 

We have got around it for reporting purposes by introducing a second ‘reporting name’ field to group those codes/names together which we know to be the same institution, or separate out those with the same name but we know it’s a different institution (but only for those prev insts of interest to us!). You could achieve this directly within your business system if you have a spare field, or it’s the sort of task that might well be incorporated as part of an ETL process in your Business Intelligence software... it’s a one-off investment of time to break the back of the job with periodic maintenance as new codes are introduced or to deal with the inevitable mergers or name changes.

 

In most cases, we’re primarily interested in our regional partners and are looking at grouping others together for reporting purposes, using the postcode and institution type (e.g. FE College – North West England; Comprehensive School – West Midlands), this avoids the need to consider the individual names of all 19,000 records and just focus on those that we know are important to us. Unfortunately the postcode and type data is also problematic in some cases (I think these records come from UCAS?). It’s work in progress here, anyhow!

 

Regards,

 

Mike

 

 

 

Dear All,

 

Do you know of anyone within your organisation who has successfully come up with a consistent list of previous institution data that they’d be happy to share?

 

I’ve spent several days on this but am struggling to come up with a way without manually trawling through around 19,000 records!

 

You’ll see the problem if I highlight a small subset, showing the PREVINST code as held by HESA and the provided establishment name;

 

D3306092	Abbey College (this one’s in Birmingham)
D2136048	Abbey College (this one’s the same as Abbey College, London)
D8856026	Abbey College (this one and the next are in Worcestershire)
D9186103	Abbey College
D8736049	Abbey College Cambridge (this is the same as U16664 but was supplied without the comma)
D3526044	Abbey College
U16664	Abbey College, Cambridge
U11733	Abbey College, London
U15779	Abbey College, Malvern
U16307	Abbey College, Manchester
U11214	Abbey College, Ramsey
D8734603	Abbey College, Ramsey
U89420	Abbey Community College, Co Roscommon
U89146	Abbey Community College, Waterford
U89213	Abbey Community College, Wicklow
D9066018	Abbey Gate College
U10291	Abbey Gate College
D8756060	Abbey Gate College (this one and the one below are the same place but have different D codes)
D8966018	Abbey Gate College

 

I’d like to be able to have a list that has a consistent establishment name or some way of identifying each establishment uniquely, to identify where our students come from.

 

With best wishes,

 

Elaine Mallion

Planning & Performance Reporting Analyst

 

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