51. Letter from Sir Howard Newby, Chairman,
HEFCE, to the Chairman of the Committee
I am afraid that I may have inadvertently misled
the Committee in my evidence on 5 March 2003. Within the evidence
in Question 484, I was asked whether we require institutions to
deposit their admissions procedure with us.
We do ask institutions to give us information
on admissions, but only in the context of the widening participation
strategy. Whilst this includes much useful information, such as
approaches and specific targets, it is not the detailed procedure
manual that Committee members may have imagined from my comments.
However, we do provide advice to institutions
on admission, for example, by our support for the recent publication
of the "Fair Enough?" report produced by UUK which sets
out a range of good practices and case studies. Advice is provided
to individual institutions by Action on Access, a consortium of
higher education specialists that we fund.
In Question 480 I promised to see if we could
release details of the postcodes that attract the premium. Under
the terms of our agreement we are not able to make generally available
the look-up between individual postcodes (of which there are over
2 million) and the cluster based participation classification.
However, we have spoken to the distributors of the software that
performs this task', and they are happy for us to let you as the
Chairman of the Committee have a copy of it for evaluation purposes,
provided it is not passed on to any third party, and is destroyed
on completion of the evaluation.
If it helps the Committee they may be interested
to know that the National Audit Office have looked into how the
postcode classifier was derived and used and they were content
with what they found.
The Committee was also interested in some work
we have done on the effects of school performance on higher education
achievement. This work has not been finalised yet, but I enclose
a note of the main findings to date, that was presented at the
"Fair Enough Conference" in January 2003[29].
Since then we have carried out the multi-level modelling described
at paragraph 53. We have also explored the hypothesis that independent
school students' HE achievement might be explained by their disproportionate
attendance at more selective, and possibly more demanding, universities.
All this work has confirmed our original findings, that is that
there are not consistent differences in the achievement of students
from schools with dithering performance, but there are differences
between students from state and independent schools.
The software is essentially a database of postcodes
with their relationship to types of areas schools with differing
performance, but there are differences between students from state
and independent schools.
March 2003
29 Not printed. Back
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