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