ESFA Update academies: 22 January 2020
Published 22 January 2020
Applies to England
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1. Reminder: the academies accounts return deadline has now passed
The deadline to submit your trust’s accounts return has now passed.
Thank you to all trusts who submitted their trust’s accounts return before the deadline. If you have not submitted your accounts return, please make every effort to do so immediately.
If you are having difficulties completing or submitting the form, please see our guidance on GOV.UK or send us a query using the online enquiry form. Please select the option ‘Academies financial returns’ and provide your trust’s UPIN.
A reminder that ESFA will publish the names of academy trusts who are late, or do not submit, two or more financial returns in each academic year. We strongly advise all users to allow enough time for all checks to be completed and signed off before any deadlines.
2. Action: Condition Data Collection (CDC) – accessing condition reports for your schools
The CDC programme collects condition, contextual and building management data for every state-maintained school and college in England which will help inform how we target future capital investment to where it is needed most. We have now completed the programme, visited, and released reports to over 22,000 schools and wanted to thank you for your support.
If you have not accessed the condition reports for the schools you are responsible for, you can download them from the CDC portal. You should already have access to the portal and instructions on how to access your reports. If you require further information, please submit your enquiry using our online enquiry form, including the name and URN of your school(s).
The portal will be taken offline at the end of July 2020, so please save a copy of your report before then, if required.
Guidance on managing your estate effectively is available on GOV.UK.
3. Information: Learning Records Service temporarily closed due to data trust breach
Due to a recent data breach by a UK Register of Learning Provider, we have temporarily closed the Learning Records Service whilst we complete investigations.
We are continuing to monitor access and audit logs to highlight unusual activity to ensure this situation does not happen again via any provider.
Our checks are almost complete and we will start to provide access to the Learner Record Service from tomorrow. We will endeavour to get the service fully up and running as quickly as possible.
We will leave no options off the table when it comes to taking action or seeking for others, such as the Information Commissioner, to take action against any learning provider that has breached its agreement with us and wrongly shared data.
4. Information: high needs place change request outcomes 2020 to 2021
We have published the place change request outcomes: 2020 to 2021 that will inform the funded place numbers for the 2020 to 2021 academic year in academies, free schools, further education colleges and independent learning providers.
You should review the published outcomes as soon as possible, to ensure the numbers reflect those expected. If an institution is not listed, this means no change was notified for that institution and the published 2019 to 2020 place numbers will be used as the basis of the 2020 to 2021 allocation.
A local authority, academy or further education institution may contact ESFA to query their 2020 to 2021 place numbers within the enquiry window, which closes on Friday 7 February 2020. Requests to change place numbers received after 7 February are unlikely to be considered.
More information about the enquiry window can be found in the place change notification process: technical note.
5. Your feedback: remittance advice for multi-academy trusts – can you help us improve the remittance advice from ESFA?
We are looking for volunteers from multi-academy trusts to inform our on-going user research into the remittance advice that you receive from ESFA.
We have identified a number of challenges around the remittance advice and would like to invite user feedback on the potential solutions that we are developing.
If you are interested in taking part in any of the pre-release trials over the next eight weeks please email us at understand.mypayments@education.gov.uk.