Time Allocation Survey Briefing Document
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Each year the University asks all
academic members of staff (except where funded 100% externally) to complete a
simple form to record how they spent time during a particular week. This note
explains briefly how we designed the exercise to make it as simple as
possible, what the next steps are, how staff can help improve the exercise,
but, most significantly, why it is very important for Schools that academic
staff complete their forms carefully: The University
could lose millions in research funding if the
results from our survey are deemed unreliable. |
Our Approach
Drawing on the experience of other universities, and particularly
- we
require each academic to record their allocation of time for just one
week;
- we
have designed both the form that each academic has to complete and the
accompanying explanatory notes to make them as straightforward as
possible;
- we have introduced a
system to allow forms to be completed on-line.
Why is TAS Important?
TAS is important for a number of reasons:
Internal Factors
(i)
If we are to manage the
university to achieve its Vision 2020 objectives while being financially
sustainable we need to understand the income and costs associated with the broad
range of activities we carry out so that if we expand some activities we need
to be sure that the costs do not exceed the income. The biggest element in our
cost base is staff time, and while for many staff it is fairly clear how their
time relates to different activities, academic staff can be engaged in a wide
range of the activities the university undertakes, and so we need to understand
how much of their time is spent on different activities.
(ii)
TAS also provides
information on how many hours a week our academic staff are
working.
External Factors
(iii)
TAS was introduced in
1999/2000 as part of the TRAC (Transparent Approach to Costing) process, which
is designed to assess how far each University is managed in a way that is
financially sustainable. Under TRAC all Universities are required by HEFCE to
identify each year their costs by broad categories of activities such as
Research and Teaching, and, for the reasons given in (i), TAS is a key part of
this exercise. The requirement for all universities to produce annual TRAC data
has been a critical element in the negotiations with the government over the
past 10 years which has led to significantly increased funding for higher
education, both for recurrent funding and capital funding. While the focus in
the early years of TRAC has been on funding research and capital, the debate in
the next few years will be on the sustainable costs of teaching, and the data
derived from TAS will be an important element in the debate to persuade the
government that more funding is needed for teaching.
(iv)
More recently, TRAC
principles have been used to develop fEC – full economic costing of
research grants and contracts. This has been another source of additional
funding to universities – Research Councils were given more funding to
meet the additional costs of fEC. fEC principles have
also been extended to EU funded research grants.
(v)
However both the funding councils
(HEFCE) and the Research Councils (RCUK) require each university to undergo a
Funding Assurance Process (FAP) to ensure that it is applying TRAC and fEC
principles properly. An important component of FAP is to check that TAS is
being conducted satisfactorily (e.g. we have high response rates, statistically
supported sampling procedures etc). If we fail to satisfy HEFCE and RCUK then
financial penalties are imposed. Specifically in submitting research grants we
will not be able to use our own rates for estates and indirect costs but rather
will have to use ‘default’ rates set by RCUK, until such time as
our procedures are deemed to have improved. These default rates are very low
and we have calculated that this could cost schools millions in lost research
income while the default rates apply.
So quite a lot
of resources for the University depend on getting TRAC and TAS right.
What is the process for collecting TAS data?
(i)
Each academic will be asked to
complete the survey for one week in each financial year.
(i)
Each academic member of
staff is assigned (at random) one week (7 days) of the year for which to record
how they need to allocate all their working hours.
(ii)
For each member of academic
staff, we will contact you 4 weeks in advance to notify you which week you have
been allocated, to send you the forms and guidance notes, and you will be given
up to 4 weeks afterwards to submit your form.
(iii)
Individual data will treated strictly confidentially. We will ask Heads of School
to comment on the overall reasonableness of the (un-named) data aggregated for
their school.
How you can
help refine our processes
Although we have taken a
number of steps to considerably simplify the process, there will be scope to
make further modifications in future. So if you have suggestions about how you
think the process could be further simplified or improved please send them to
the Head of Cost Accounting melanie.j.lythgo@manchester.ac.uk
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In summary I
stress that this is an important exercise for the University, and while that
is true for all universities, as one of the |
Professor Martin Humphries,
Vice President & Dean of
Life Sciences