HESA has agreed two changes to the 2018 data:
1. Religious belief – HESA has extended the coverage for religious belief to all students in the Student record, to monitor equal opportunities issues in the higher education sector, and support you in meeting your obligations under the Equality Act 2010. As such, the field Student.RELBLF is now compulsory for all providers to submit as part of the 2018 Student Return.
Currently, the religion question is optional in our Apply products, and is passed to providers as a NULL/Blank value in the StarJ, where the question has not been answered. Student.RELBLF is currently taken from the 'Additional information' section in Apply, for applicants who have answered ‘Yes’ to the question, 'Is your permanent home in the UK?' – i.e. for all UK domiciled applicants to UCAS Undergraduate, UCAS Conservatoires, and UCAS Teacher Training. HESA has introduced a 99 ‘Not known’ value in their coding frame, to take into account unknown data.
HESA has asked us to change the derivation of this field as part of the StarJ 2018 process, where Null values exist to map to 99 ‘Not known’ for all applicants, including non-UK domiciled applicants.
2. Qualent3 values – we’ve remapped Qualent3 values for reformed A levels, from P93 to P50, and for international A and AS levels, from P93 to P92.
Additional information on these changes is available on our ‘HESA return’ web page.