Student Instance FTE: Field
Definition
Student instance FTE represents the institution's best academic judgement of the full-time equivalence of the learner (for this record) during the reporting year 01 August to 31 July.
Reason Required
To allow analysis by FTE, representing student load, rather than by headcount or apportioned numbers; particularly significant for analysing load and allocations of funding for part-time students.
Schema Definitions
- XML Entity Name
- STULOAD
- Field Length
- 5
- Data type
- xs:decimal
- Minimum occurrences
- 0
- Maximum occurrences
- 1
- Part of
- LearningDeliveryHE
Collection Requirements
- Aim Types 3,4 and 5
Valid Entries
Must contain a value in the range 0.1 to 300.0
Notes
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Full-time, full year students would normally be returned as 100 and part-time students returned as a proportion of an equivalent full-time course. Comparisons and weightings of different full-time, full year courses are not expected. The proportion of part-time study can be estimated on either a 'time' or a 'credit' basis. The FTE should not be weighted to take account of any resourcing implications of different courses.
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The length of this field is 5 characters, data should be returned with or without leading zeros or the decimal place, e.g. 005.0 or 5.0 or 5.
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For full guidance about this field, please refer to the HESA specification.
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All students following a course would initially be assumed to have the same FTE. An adjustment may need to be made at individual student level if a student did not actually follow the whole course academic year, e.g. because they left half way through. This individual student adjustment need only be at a very broad-brush level.
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The calculation of FTE therefore becomes a function of proportion (that the course represents of a full-time benchmark course) x time (amount of the course that the student followed in the HESA reporting year).
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It is recognised that this cannot be exact in all cases and a strict pro-rata model is not expected. The aim is to give a better approximation than the use of arbitrary conversion factors.