In 2006 the Higher Education Funding Council (HEFCE) wanted to improve the student decision-making process in selecting a university or college. To achieve this it needed to find a way of making accessible the vast amount of statistical information held in the annual National Student Survey and other institution specific data. Hotcourses and UCAS were commissioned over a four year period to develop a means of analysing and re-publishing this data in order to meet this challenge.

The finished site now:

Attracts over 200,000 unique visits per month

Enables users to see the types of job graduates went onto after university for each subject area

Has a site availability score of 99.98%

Allows users to compare providers offering subjects such as art to see how many UCAS entry points each provider requires, or compare the types of jobs students went onto after graduating in the same subject but at different providers

Enables the sharing of data through syndication with other websites

In addressing this challenge, Hotcourses Solutions:

Analysed and organised 43,418,110 data records in order to re-publish them in a structured and statistically valid format

Attended student focus groups to ensure that the interface and fuctionality would be clear for various audiences

Developed, with UCAS and HEFCE, a new look, feel and design for the site and rebranded it for its launch as the Unistats website

Developed a bespoke Contact Management System {CMS) solution for universities and colleges to add comments to their data. This is only accessible to registered providers through a secure system that determines each user's access rights to different levels of data

Designed the entire system using a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) solution utilising web services to support interfaces with various stakeholder systems

Developed functionality to allow users to dynamically compare providers