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On Monday I shall be going to a meeting of the DfEE Student Support Design Group at which we shall start to talk about improvements needed to the administrative systems for 2000/2001, and the changes to course details contained on the SLC database of courses and term dates. I should be grateful if you could let me know by the middle of Friday afternoon (say 3 pm) of any specific proposals you would like me to take forward, and of any specific problems you would like solved. My main concern will be to get the DfEE to look carefully at the targets for production of the various sets of instructions to the various players, to find out what caused the delays this year, and to make sure that next year instructions are issued in time to allow LEAs, SLC and HEIs to prepare properly and meet deadlines. I will also ask for a re-design of the software provided by the SLC for collection of the courses and terms data, and a thorough revision of the instructions which go with it. I am thinking along the lines of our being able to create a series of term-date codes, with a set of actual dates associated with each code. We would then associate a code with each course-year. This should dramatically reduce the amount of data to be keyed and also enable the update in future years to be for the most part a matter of revising the dates associated with each term-date code. I will also tell the DfEE that we will need to review later the cheque-handling and reporting processes which are still to come for 1999-2000. Roger Clark Academic Registrar University of Reading %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%