What is the problem?
There are a number of courses offered by providers that combine two discrete subjects into a single course. For example:
- English and Media (38PP) - University of Sussex
- Drama (with English) (2N9G) - Middlesex University
- Media Studies (with English) (2VQZ) - The Royal Greenwich Teaching School Alliance
- Physical Education with Biology (3CZB) - University of Wolverhampton
This is due to the fact that there have not been consistent naming conventions in UCAS.
Currently, Find presents bursary information automatically, choosing the higher bursary of any subject the course is tagged with.
The impact of this is two-part:
- Candidates are unclear what bursaries are available to them
- The Department for Education (DfE) does not know what bursary payment to make to the candidate
What have we done?
We searched the database for courses with multiple subject tags and used these as examples to build a specification for handling dual subject courses.
We contacted these providers to discuss subject weighting, bursary eligibility and how this eligibility is decided.
Additionally, we spoke to initial training funding (ITT) funding to get an understanding of policy around dual subjects and funding.
What did policy tell us?
All courses labelled as subject with subject should have the bursary information of the first subject in the title.
For courses labelled as subject and subject, the definition is less clear as responsibility sits with the training provider.
Policy teams indicated that the decision about offering bursaries for subject and subject courses rests with the provider offering the course. Eligibility for subject bursaries is determined by the provider when submitting trainee data through DTTP.
Any complications are settled on a case by case basis between the Funding team and the provider in question. The impact here is on the candidate, not the Department or the provider. However, as mentioned above, the responsibility rests with the provider when setting up the course.
As a result, to be able to offer (assess for, in policy speak) a bursary, a provider must:
- have allocations to the subject in question
- register a training position as the subject that holds the bursary
They must, in this instance, provide evidence that the course content contained at least 50% weighted to the subject that it is being registered for.
Re-scoping the problem
Due to the feedback from policy, the team decided to focus on the problem that derived from our logic. This could be categorised as:
- A ‘subject with subject’ course (for example, Physical Education with Mathematics)
- Where the first subject in the course title does not offer a bursary, but the second does
What was the scale of the issue?
In total, we uncovered 17 courses from 6 unique providers that were falsely advertising bursary information on Find.
What did we do?
We decided to deliver a quick fix to the problem and work with the financial incentives team longer term to improve the approach to assigning financial incentives information.
As a short term solution, the team updated the financial incentives information to ‘eligible for student loans’ for:
- Courses that contain ‘with’ in the title
- Courses that start with: Drama, Media Studies and Physical Education
- Courses with more than one subject tag in the database
This problem has now been resolved for the 17 courses identified.