What is Transparency Review, TRAC and fEC ?
Transparency Review and TRAC
The Transparency Review (TR) was initiated following the Government’s 1998 Comprehensive Spending Review. The aim of it is to provide information on the income and expenditure carried out by Universities, and this information is returned to the Higher Education Funding Council each year.
TRAC was born out of the Transparency Review. It is the Transparent Approach to Costing therefore TRAC is the process rather than the actual return produced. Since 2000, TRAC has been the standard methodology used by the 165 Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) in the UK for costing their main activities (Teaching, Research, and Other core activities), and it is increasingly informing the public funding of higher education. From the 2004/2005 Transparency Review onwards, the analysis of income is now also a mandatory requirement.
While it followed naturally from work done in the Higher Education sector in the 1990s, introducing TRAC was a government requirement. It was developed in 1998 as part of the Transparency Review, was piloted during the academic year 1999/2000, and implemented progressively from 2000-01. The dual-support reform of Research funding in 2003/04 has given further impetus (and new costing requirements) to TRAC, and further implementation work now in hand by institutions will continue for several years (until at least 2008) e.g. the introduction of Major Research Facilities and Laboratory Technician rates.
TRAC has already introduced new processes and activities in institutions that sit alongside existing accounting and project management systems. The most notable so far from an academic’s perspective are the requirements to allocate academic staff time via the Time Allocation Surveys (TAS). Time allocation has been the most contentious issue, but is essential if we are to know where our academic staff effort is being directed, and to allow us to plan how the costs can be funded. The TRAC time allocation approach offers HEIs a light-touch approach and does not require the use of timesheets.
TRAC(T)
TRAC (T) stands for Transparent Approach to Costing for Teaching. It is a HEFCE requirement (2005/06 onwards) and is a new framework for costing teaching based on the established principles of the Transparent Approach to Costing.
The data is officially reported to HEFCE and will be used to inform the teaching funding methodology although the data should also provide useful internal management information.
TRAC(T) has not created any additional demands on Faculties as it is currently an analysis exercise carried by the Finance Office. The preparation of the data is completed using figures from the annual TRAC return and student numbers taken from our student information systems.
For more details read TRAC(T) overview
Full Economic Costing (fEC)
fEC Research
Full Economic Costing (fEC) for Research was introduced in the sector with effect from 1st September 2005, which extended the TRAC methodology to costing of individual research projects. Using figures produced in the annual Transparency Return, Estates rates and Indirect rates are produced to allow full costing of research projects.
The fEC tool assists staff in building the cost of research projects on a full economic cost basis.
fEC Teaching
The University is in the process of developing fEC for teaching. It is planned that the methodology and a web-based costing tool will be available for use in the 2008/09 academic year, for new programme and unit costings that are to run from 2009/10 onwards.
For further background reading see TRAC HISTORY