How to amend HESA data

HESA will only open its post-collection system (fixed database) when it has received explicit instructions from us to do so. HESA will process any submitted amendments according to their normal validation and credibility checks. It will pass data that reaches the 'committed' status to HEFCE.

The fixed database will only be open during a limited period (see the HESA web-site for further details).

The agreement between HESA and HEFCE allows for the costs of processing such exceptional amendments to be recovered from institutions by HESA. It has been agreed that for the student record this charge is set at 20 per cent of the institution's annual HESA subscription. Please see HESA Student record circulars for further details of this charge.

Submitting amendments
Further corrections
Onward use of amendments
Related links

Submitting amendments

Action plan

To enable HEFCE to authorise HESA to open its fixed database, institutions need to submit an action plan to HEFCE. The guide to action plans provides information on submitting and completing action plans.

Authorisation

On approval of the action plan, we will send an e-mail to HESA, copied to the institution, authorising HESA to accept post-collection amendments to their fixed database.

The e-mail will contain:

a summary of the nature of the amendments to be made extracted directly from the approved action plan (for example, the HESA fields that we expect to be amended along with an approximation of the number of records that will be affected)
a date by which we expect the revised data to be submitted.

HEFCE processing

Having received the amendments that institutions have submitted to us, we will produce updated derived statistics outputs which we will make available to the institution via the HEFCE extranet.

If we are content with the outputs, where appropriate, we will ask the institution to confirm that the amendments have had the impact expected.

Upon receipt of this confirmation we will send an e-mail to HESA, copied to the institution, notifying it that we are content with the revised data, and requesting that they set the institution's data to 'credible'. HESA will continue the exceptional data collection processing (for example, credibility checking) until the process is complete.

Final stage

At the end of the process, HESA will mark the return as 'credible' to allow the institution to record a 'sign-off' transaction.

Further corrections

If, during the above process, we or the institution identify that further HESA data amendments are required, we will ask the institution to submit a revised action plan and the above process will be repeated.

This also applies if during credibility checking, or at any other point during the processing, HESA identifies that further amendments to HESA data are required.

HESA will request that the data are 'decommitted' and any necessary revisions to the data made before the data are once again committed, at which point the above process will be repeated.

We will identify and contact institutions that have not submitted valid files by the expected date or where there are other significant delays (for example in achieving a valid 'commit' transaction).

Onward use of amendments

Generally we do not expect amendments submitted via this route to be used to inform routine publications such as the HESA 'students in higher education institutions' volumes, performance indicators, or the Unistats statistics.