Correspondence

Inform December 2021

Updated 18 January 2022

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You can find the latest from ESFA in our weekly newsletter, ESFA Update.

Applies to England

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This publication is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sfa-inform/inform-december-2021

1. Action: Help us improve ESFA services

The ESFA are keen to understand your feedback so that we can build services that are clear and effective for all people who interact with them.

We regularly run user research with a range of users including those in product and technical roles to help us improve our services. Feedback from our users helps us iterate designs and concepts.

If you’d like to be contacted about research opportunities please complete our 30-second form and we will be in contact. Our research can vary from 1 to 1 research sessions, surveys or focus groups. The research is entirely voluntary and you can opt-out at any time by emailing user.researchers@education.gov.uk.

2. Information: Financial Assurance: Monitoring post-16 funding for 2021 to 2022

The newly improved post-16 monitoring dashboard is now available and contains the first complete dataset for the academic year 2021 to 2022, following providers’ R04 ILR submissions.

We have also started sharing data with devolved authorities to help them manage their adult provision and identify any specific issues they may need to follow up with providers.

Thanks to feedback from and consultation with, a range of providers, key changes have been made to the dashboard including:

  • Providers can now select filters from the landing page and download data from the first tab, making access to the data more immediate.

  • We’re currently testing a new RAG rating and have highlighted the “average queries per aim” and “average queries per learner” red, amber, or green to help you understand the scale and severity of the number of queries generated off your data submissions.  We welcome your feedback on how useful you find this.

  • In the “actions you need to take” box, on the landing page, we have grouped these reports together to provide further clarity on where recovery will be made at year-end and where we may request evidence from you.

  • There is a new “additional information” tab that displays data about subcontractors, linked to any queries and a breakdown of the total figures by funding stream. This will help you to identify other specific issues to ensure your data is accurate.

  • We have published a known issues log which is now held within the dashboard, for the first time, to provide easier access to this information.

We are still on track to include School Census data in the dashboard in Spring 2022.

Over the coming months, we will be posting hints and tips for getting the best out of the dashboard and using a wider range of media for this, such as Twitter and LinkedIn, to reach as many of our providers of post-16 education and training as possible and to promote regular usage of the funding rule reports.

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