Inform August 2019
Updated 18 January 2022
Applies to England
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1. ILR 2020 to 2021 Year: Proposed Changes
The Education & Skills Funding Agency is happy to announce a significantly smaller list of proposed changes to the ILR for the 2020 to the 2021 year, following your feedback on previous years’ changes and in line with our change management governance.
The list below sets out the key proposals we are considering. Details of each will soon be posted to the feconnect forum and open for comments until 20 September. Housekeeping changes will not appear on the feconnect forum for feedback. Your responses will contribute to our analysis and our decisions will be confirmed in December.
| Title | Aim |
|---|---|
| T-Levels | To record, identify and validate the T-Level programmes. |
| Off the Job Training – Actual Hours | (Following implementation of the OTJT Planned Hours field in 19/20 dataset.) To enable visibility of actual training delivered. |
| Housekeeping | To review and remove from the ILR any fields which are no longer meeting the business objective. |
2. New workforce survey for the FE sector
The Department for Education needs your help with the Education and Training Professionals Survey.
We want to understand more about the FE workforce and hear directly from staff at Independent Training Providers (ITPs), Sixth Form Colleges (SFCs) and Adult and Community Learning (ACLs) providers.
At the start of August we launched the survey with ITPs – thank you to everyone who has taken part so far! We will contact Sixth Form Colleges and Adult and Community Learning providers from 9th September.
We have commissioned IFF Research to carry out the project on our behalf. The first stage is a 20-30 minute telephone interview with the HR manager or equivalent to gather information on staff numbers and vacancies.
We will then ask the organisation to distribute an online staff survey, aiming to find out about the qualifications, background, and experiences, of teaching and training staff working in the same organisation.
The staff survey should take around 10-15 minutes to complete. Emails with further details will be sent out soon to eligible SFCs and ACLs, and IFF Research will begin contacting them for telephone interviews.
For more information please visit the ETP Survey webpage, or contact ETPsurvey@iffresearch.com at IFF Research, or Rosie.Chalam-Judge@education.gov.uk at the Department for Education. The results from the survey will be published.
By taking part you will help us support the FE sector and contribute to the future direction of policy.
3. Qualification Achievement Rates 2018 to 2019
We have released the R12 in-year Qualification Achievement Rate (QAR) data for 2018 to 2019 on both the Hub and the dashboard on the View Your Education Data portal. The in-year QAR guidance and QAR webpage provide details about this data release and accessing the dashboard.
We are now approaching the final data collections for 2018 to 2019; we use the final R14 data to calculate qualification achievement rates (QARs) and minimum standards.
You should review your in-year QAR data to check that your data is accurate. We have supplied some more information about the common data issues and funding monitoring reports that can help you review your data. We urge you to review your data now, as once the R14 ILR submission window closes on 17 October 2019 you will not be able to fix any issues from your 2018 to 2019 ILR return. We cannot change your data on your behalf.
To access the data, please ensure you have the correct IDAMS user access.
We have published version 2 of the following documents:
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The QAR technical specification documents - these documents provide technical information about how we produce the QAR dataset. The changes to the apprenticeship and education & training specifications are:
- the exclusion of records recorded as withdrawn because they were part of a merger
- an update to the rule for the qualifying period exclusion, to exclude restarts where the original instance of learning was with a different provider
- Data extract guidance – this document explains how you can use the data extract to show achievement rates, pass rates and retention rates to match those in the QAR dashboard. The only change in version 2 is that we have added the ‘Restart Indicator’ to the extract.
You should read these documents alongside the business rules, which explain the methodology for calculating QARs for 2018 to 2019.
View your education data dashboard
The QAR Dashboard has undergone further development since the R10 release. Here is a summary of what we have been working on:
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Logging Feedback and Ideas- We have added buttons to the dashboard which allow you to ‘Log Feedback’ or ‘Log an Idea’. Your responses are sent directly to the development team so that we can review and monitor feedback and ideas. For us to continue improving the dashboard, we need your feedback and ideas so please do take some time to have a look through the latest version and let us know your thoughts.
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Embedded Tutorial Page- The dashboard now contains a “Tutorial Page”. It contains most of the information in the user guidance document, but it is interactive and allows you to click through the different pieces of functionality to understand how they work. We are aiming to replace all future user guidance with this tutorial page. Please let us know whether you prefer this style of guidance and your comments by submitting feedback.
4. feconnect ask the experts
We recently ran a question and answer session on feconnect about the Submit Learner Data service and the Funding Information Service (FIS).
This was a popular event with 35 contributors and over 150 posts made within the discussion topic. That week we saw a significant increase in the number of users and page views for feconnect.
In light of its success, we’re keen to run similar events. Email fe.connect@education.gov.uk with what topics you would like covered.