Important: Please check your Student HESA Tracking Dashboard for next year’s HESA Track

Now that HEAT’s data entry and data cleaning time period is drawing to an end, we are preparing for the next HESA Track extract for the 2023/2024 HE Entry Year.

Despite delays to the 2022/23 HE Entry data, we are hopeful that next year’s timeline will return to normal, in which case it is that time of year when we need to ask you to use the Student HESA Tracking Dashboard to check your records by Friday 29th November 2024. This will enable you to check your records for your organisation that will be included in the next HESA Track, and at the beginning of December, we will be extracting records for all eligible Students who were ready to enter higher education in 2023/24 or earlier.

As detailed in our recent update in regards to the expected arrival of the HESA Track data for the 2022/23 HE Entry Year, we asked Jisc whether the 2022/23 HE Entry data delays were likely to occur for the following cohort. Jisc said they hoped that the data for the following cohort would be available far earlier next year, likely the Summer, therefore we are sticking to our usual data cleaning and extraction timeline with a hard deadline of the last working day of November 2024. Further information and resources about the HEAT Track Deadline can be found on the Data Management page.

Student HESA Tracking Dashboard

You can view the Student records that we will be sending to HESA for the 2023/24 HE Entry Year via the Student HESA Tracking tab on the database homepage (members only).

On the dashboard, the ‘Summary of students included in the next track (live data)’ table can be used to view the Student records we will be sending to HESA on your organisation’s behalf. To learn more about this tab, please download the Database Dashboard – Student HESA Tracking Tab User Guide from the File Store (members only).

Important information to check:

• Please make sure that you are happy with the Student records that we will be sending to HESA on your behalf
• Please also ensure that students are assigned to the correct ‘Expected HE Entry Year’ as this will allow us to calculate accurate progression rates when the data are returned by HESA

This dashboard summarises the Student records we will be sending to HESA. It does not show a comprehensive list of the records not being sent to HESA. Please take some time to check that all Students linked to Activities you are expecting HESA Tracking data for are included in the Student HESA Tracking Dashboard (top table). To do this, you may need to run an Activity including Students export and cross check Student HEAT IDs with those appearing in your Student HESA Tracking Dashboard.

Sometimes, records may be excluded from the Track if students’ ‘Expected HE Entry Years’ are set too late. You can simply change students’ ‘Expected HE Entry Year’ field to instantly “push” them into the HESA Track and instantly appear in your Student HESA Tracking Dashboard summary. This is also the case for any other fields that determine whether a student is included in the HESA Track, for example ‘Permission to Track’ being set to ‘Yes’, or adding any missing personal data needed for the HESA Track.