We’ve been waiting since the back end of 2023 for a proper review of the beleaguered Data Futures programme – today brings confirmation that it has started.

PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) will be carrying out the work, and is already out speaking to sector groups and institutions. It is acting under the watchful eye of a steering group chaired by Margaret Monckton, chief financial officer at the University of Nottingham.

We are only told publicly about this after the group has met twice. We don’t get the names of members, but we do know that the following groups and bodies are represented:

• Academic Registrars Council (ARC)
• The Department of the Economy (the Northern Irish HE regulator)
• HEFCW, soon to be Medr (the Welsh tertiary regulator)
• The Higher Education Strategic Planners Association (HESPA)
• Jisc (which I guess includes HESA for these purposes)
• The Office for Students
• The Scottish Funding Council (the Scottish tertiary regulator)
• The Student Record Officers Conference (SROC)
• The Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA).

All this work is supported by a secretariat drawn from Office for Students staff, who will support three or four online meetings. Everyone involved is held to strict confidentiality terms.

Though the membership looks useful, I would have valued seeing more representation from people who actually worked to submit 2022-23 student data. It is great that SROC are on board (I am a fan) but one representative needs to cover a lot of very variable experiences at all kinds of providers – I know everything from software choice, to personal experience, to institutional managerial support had an impact here. Further to that, there are numerous experienced staff out there who worked on some iteration of HEDIIP or Data Futures and would have had a lot of interest to add.

The requirements and scope are interesting – in a rational world these would have been published so that interested parties in and around the sector could feed back before work kicked off – but here we are I guess.

What will it say?

The final report, due “in the autumn”, focuses on three key areas – governance, delivery, communications and engagement.

Under governance we learn that the review will get into the detail of what “appropriate and accurate” information was available to those in governance roles and at what times – something that OfS, who as recently as last summer were very happy with progress, would dearly love to know. There are also questions about how changes to scope (and funding) were made and communicated – something that has the possibility to point the finger at the way OfS managed the programme in various forms.

The delivery section will look at the amount of testing that could be done, and when and by whom. One story I have heard is that testing initially focused on the common use cases, and it was only when the platform met the full complexity of the sector’s data that issues begun to occur (something the specification notes as “bugs at the point of go-live”. There’s big questions about the design and instantiation of the quality rules that led to the preponderance of “unknown” data points, and the role of funders, regulators, and software suppliers in identifying risks.

On communications and engagement we’re looking at the way Jisc communicated with statutory customers and technology partners, the way Jisc and regulators communicated with providers (and how this was evaluated), and the way – crucially – regulators communicated with Jisc about what was required.

There are also broader questions on what has been delivered and what is still outstanding, the forward technical life of the platform and the capacity for data collection as it evolves, the likelihood of in-year collection being delivered successfully, and lessons learned from the process.

What strikes me is that the investigations don’t get into the long and storied history of Data Futures, the numerous stops, starts, and scope creeps that stud this sorry tale, and the wider way in which OfS has sought to move away from a consensual, multi-user, system of UK wide data collection – I hope the review team will find space to consider this.