Correspondence

ESFA Update further education: 29 August 2018

Published 29 August 2018

This correspondence was withdrawn on 20 February 2020

This has been withdrawn as it’s out of date. Find the latest information from the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) in the latest ESFA Update.

1. Action: submission of external assurance on subcontracting controls certificates by providers and employer-providers who deliver adult provision, including apprenticeships and traineeships

As communicated on the Wednesday, 27 June, you must send your completed certificates for 2017 to 2018 to CF1718.SUBCONTRACTING@education.gov.uk by Friday, 14 September.

You can find information about this requirement in the updated guidance document alongside the certificate proforma on GOV.UK.

If you have any queries, please contact the service desk.

2. Action: personal data in qualification queries

Colleges and training providers must not send us personal information about individual learners, when asking us about the status of certain qualifications. This includes asking us about qualifications that learners already hold, such as for English and maths requirements in an apprenticeship.

Providers must not send us queries containing certificates or any other documents that identify individual learners – these are information security breaches under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). We will destroy any personal data contained in queries, and return them to you. We also need to report these as security breaches under the GDPR.

You only need to send us an anonymised description of the evidence that you hold for a learner. We will ask you for more information if we need to.

If you have any questions about this, please contact the Qualifications team.

3. Information: Individualised Learner Record (ILR) - R14 hard close

It is critical that you make any amendments to your 2017 to 2018 ILR data before the hard close at 6pm on the 18 October 2018.

After this date, you will not be able to fix any data match issues from your 2017 to 2018 ILR return and will not receive payment for activity relating to August 2017 to July 2018.

4. Information: financial assurance - monitoring the funding rules 2018 to 2019

We have published the funding rules monitoring plan for the funding year 2018 to 2019. This covers adult education budget (AEB) delivery, advanced learner loans, and apprenticeships.

The plan includes the funding rules we will monitor for each area and the new monitoring reports we will publish on the Hub following the R04 ILR submission in 2018 to 2019.

For further information, please contact the funding rules monitoring team through the service desk.

5. Information: external reports for funding rules monitoring and qualification achievement rates

From 1 October 2018, Birst (My BI) dashboards will no longer be available. As a replacement, we will provide you with Excel reports on the hub during September.

The funding rules monitoring (FRM) reports will be available for R13 data and we aim to publish these by the end of September. We will update our reports guidance before we publish the reports.

We will publish a replica of the final 2016 to 2017 Qualification Achievement Rate (QAR) reports and the in-year 2017 to 2018 QAR. These will be available on the hub by the end of September, alongside the existing QAR data extracts.

If you want to keep any historical FRM or QAR reports that are currently stored on Birst (my BI), please export and save these reports before 1 October.

6. Reminder: keeping children safe in education - guidance update

DfE has updated the keeping children safe in education (KCSIE) guidance to reflect the recently revised working together to safeguard children guidance. In particular the General Data Protection Regulation, the Data Protection Act 2018 and the revised multi-agency safeguarding arrangements.

This is a reminder that KCSIE 2018 will replace KCSIE 2016 from Monday, 3 September 2018.