As many PraxisAuril members will know, the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) has issued its final consultation on proposed changes to the Higher Education Business and Community Interaction (HE-BCI) survey. As well as changes to HE-BCI this consultation also asks for feedback on plans for a one-off collection of spinout data, in order to produce a more robust UK data set with reduced burden in the longer-term (pertaining to Table 4).
PraxisAuril and its members have contributed to numerous stakeholder discussions about the Higher Education Business and Community Interaction dataset including on topics such as; data collection burden on providers, categories and definitions, and the utility of the data set in representing outputs and outcomes from knowledge exchange activities (linked to KEF metrics). We are pleased to see that HESA proposes to adopt the definition of Knowledge Exchange (KE) used in the KE Concordat, which itself was agreed by the global alliance for KE, ATTP, of which PraxisAuril is a founder member. This proposal aims to clarify the purpose of the data set to contributors and users.
PraxisAuril continues to work closely with Research England, the Higher Education Statistics Agency, and the University Commercialisation and Innovation Policy Unit (UCI) to ensure that this long-running project, and the spinout data collection, is well informed by practitioner perspectives and considers internal processes and systems as part of overall burden for reporting. The spinout project forms part of our work, collectively, to implement recommendations from the Independent Review of Spinouts. This is a short-term piece of work which will be discussed with members at our forthcoming Directors’ Forum and at our annual conference.
The HE-BCI consultation can be accessed via the HESA website https://consultation.hesa.ac.uk/service-development/consultation-on-changes-to-the-he-bci-survey/ with a deadline of Thursday, 16th May.
For members wanting to discuss their feedback with peers prior to completing the survey, Tamsin Mann (Head of Policy & Governance) will be hosting a discussion meeting at 12pm on Tuesday, 7th May. A Teams link will be shared via the Member platform (no registration required).