On 16 November 2010 the Government published two documents which set out a new strategy for further education and skills (FE), Skills for Sustainable Growth and Investing in Skills for Sustainable Growth. These skills and investment strategy documents set out the Government’s vision for reform of the further education and skills system: to increase the participation of 16-24 year olds in education, training and work, while reducing the FE resource budget by 25% over the next couple of years.

The documents cover wide areas of reform within the sector, but there was one thread in Skills for Sustainable Growth that caught my eye, which deals with our main area of interest, data. In chapter four of the executive summary of the skills strategy document Skills for Sustainable Growth the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) state their commitment to “…simplify systems and processes…” an aspect of the FE reforms also mentioned by John Hayes in his speech to Warwickshire College in Rugby this summer. In reference to streamlining monitoring arrangements, he said that BIS are seeking, “to make your relationship with the Government and our agencies less onerous.”

Now, while we’d like to think that you don’t find your dealings with us at all onerous, we do realise that you are all bearing the ‘data burden’. That’s why we are constantly looking for ways to improve the use of FE data and reduce bureaucracy, in particular by reducing the burden of the ILR. Over the last six years we stopped the steady year-on-year increase of fields in the ILR and are continually working to take out unnecessary fields wherever possible, reducing the total so far by around 15%

So you’ll understand why we were pleased to see that not only has the data thread continued in New Challenges, New Chances – the further education and skills system reform plan published on 1 December, following a consultation on FE provision for 19+ – but that in chapter nine we have been tasked to continue providing ‘a robust challenge process…that only allows change where it can clearly be demonstrated as necessary to support the effective delivery and development of the sector.’ 

We have also been asked to report on the progress of government plans to change data collections and systems, where it will benefit effective provision, and will publish an assessment on the efficiency of and burden from data collections in 2011/12 and 2014/15.

In a further step to streamline systems, we will work with BIS, in consultation with key stakeholders, to publish a road map for how to deliver better data sharing across the sector in the spring.

There is already movement towards simplifying and reducing data collected across the sector. In 2010/11 a single budget for Adult Learner Responsive and 19+ Employer Responsive provision was introduced for all colleges (except those performing poorly) and the requirement to complete Summary Statements of Activity was removed. We hope that our contributions in this area will help to identify more opportunities to significantly reduce the data burden across the FE sector.

This week’s news round up

• Reminder: 2010/11 SL05 returns deadline is 16 January 2011
• The provider guide to working with provider funding reports (PFRs) for 2011/12 is now on our website
• The outputs from the Learner Responsive Group meeting at the end of November are now on our website
• The information authority office will be closed from Monday 26 December and will reopen on Tuesday 03 January 2012.
• And finally, as a confused Santa inputs a billion delivery location postcodes to the ILR, we wish you Happy Holidays and hope you all enjoy a festive break from data entry!

All the best
Greta

Hello blog reader and welcome to my first blog post for the information authority. I am working at the information authority as a Community Facilitator and it’s my job to manage the authority’s website, this community and our social media activities.

As you probably know, we are making use of a number of social media channels at the moment, this blog, the feconnect forums and Twitter, where most of our followers are further education (FE) colleges, training providers and other organisations connected with FE. One of the great things about Twitter is that, with a little help, we can add value to our tweets by reaching out beyond our followers to a wider audience. This was demonstrated recently when the Association of Colleges re-tweeted our tweet about the 2012/13 ILR spec (which is now available on our website) to its 2000+ followers (thanks AoC).

But, we’d also like to be able to use Twitter to talk to people at the FE coalface, managing learner records, but there don’t seem to be many of you about. As far as we can tell there are only a handful of you following us at the moment. I wonder if that’s because of your organisations’ social media policy, or maybe you just don’t like Twitter? Then again we do have a number of other communications channels, our RSS feeds, web alerts and email so perhaps you don’t see the need, as you’re quite happy using one or more of these.

I’d love to hear what you think about Twitter, so please feel free to comment and if you would like to swell the ranks of our MIS followers click on the link to follow us on Twitter if you have an account, or visit the Twitter Help Centre to find out how to get started.

This week’s news round up

• The Data Service has just published the 2010/11 End of Year Learner Responsive (LR05) Qualification Success Rate (QSR) and Minimum Levels of Performance (MLP) reports. These reports are available to download from the Provider Gateway
• The 2012/13 individualised learner record (ILR) specification is now available to download from our website.
• Reminder: the R05 ILR return is due in on 06 January 2012
• And finally, don’t forget about our festive tips for data managers on our website every day this month until Friday 23 December.

Hi all

We are still working through the 60 change requests for the 2010/11 ILR that we received, and making decisions on which ones we will be rejecting, and which ones need input from the FE system before we write up recommendations for the information authority’s board meeting at the end of September.
Read the rest of this entry »

We would like your input on the data security guidance being developed to meet the needs of the FE system.
Read the rest of this entry »