What's in a KIS?

Friday, 21 September 2012

part of the KIS widget that will appear on the University web pages

You may have heard something by now about Key Information Sets (KIS). With the launch date looming now is a good time to let staff about how we will be delivering KIS on University web pages.

The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) is expecting all universities to produce a ‘Key Information Set' (KIS) for all the undergraduate programmes offered and for these to be publically available by October 2012.

KIS are one aspect of the reforms outlined in the Government White Paper Students at the Heart of the System. KIS should help to ensure that prospective students have information to enable them to make informed choices about higher education.

The University of Reading has been working for about a year to collect the relevant data and to submit them to HEFCE. These data have been checked and pulled together by HEFCE into what is being referred to as the ‘course widget'. It is mandatory that we display these widgets on each course website with the aim of providing prospective students with ‘key information' about our courses that is comparable across institutions. The KIS information will also be available via the UCAS website, Unistats and may be also used by other independent organisations.

Some data have been provided by the University (course information, financial information and accommodation costs) whilst other data such as student satisfaction scores, employment and salary information have been derived from sources such as the National Student Survey (NSS) and the Destination of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE) survey.

Schools were asked to check the information before we submitted these data to HEFCE in August. This included information such as the percentage contact hours in each year for each course, the nature of that contract and a breakdown of the manner in which courses are assessed.

When the KIS data go live we will have a clearer idea of how the information we have submitted compares with that from other institutions. As a required minimum we are displaying a widget on each of the programme pages on the central University site, together with a short explanation of how to interpret these data. However, Schools are also being encouraged to display widgets on their own undergraduate pages together with some more detailed contextual information explaining what these data contained in the widget means for prospective students.

If Schools or colleagues require further information at this stage then please contact Kirsti Wilson, Marketing Manager k.wilson@reading.ac.uk or Quinten Taylor, Planning Support Officer q.r.taylor@reading.ac.uk.

As yet it is unclear how the information will influence the decisions of potential students, but it is clear that it does provide another set of metrics which may be used to compare institutions.