Yup, seem to recall similar points coming up at the conference, particularly about transparency in the aggregate reports.

One of the problems we have is we don't always know what is included or excluded on specific reports in LIS and have difficulty matching LIS figures to what we can produce from our systems, or [...]

Hi Peter

They bumped up quite a large stack of aims, so their values are more like the LR values. It was mentioned in Update:

http://readingroom.skillsfundingagency.bis.gov.uk/sfa/skills_funding_agency-update-issue_106.pdf

Is the e-GIF schema still valid? Slightly disturbingly when I google it all I get are archived cabinet office pages and squatted dead links (eg http://www.egifcompliance.org/)?

Sorry Chris, my fault for only giving you half the story. There are no listed GLH any more, there's only the matrix…

The new funding matrix has steps (remember loadbands? yeah, like that) to take into account, so a 6 (or 12 or 24) credit qual is significantly worse off that a 7 (or 13 [...]

Level 3s will only be unfunded for over 23s, 19-23s are still funded.

Also, the reason their funding is going up is because traditionally they were funded at less than 8 glh per credit, some significantly so.

yeah, that's happening to most low level quals Chris.

If you think about it it's kind of inevitable. Entry quals in particular have been funded on the basis that it takes people longer per credit to learn, but the new formula is based on (roughly) 8 GLH per credit regardless of level (according to John Bolt [...]

if I see him down the pub tonight, I'll ask him

Thanks!

ooh, a good question! No chance of getting David Bowie is there?

failing that I think I'd like someone involved in FE Loans, someone from Whatever We're Calling The Career Service This Week (focusing on how they see the Course Directory panning out) and, i suppose, someone to try and explain SFA "simplification" to us [...]

my first question for John in the meantime though:

We talked a lot about making the ILR more comprehensible and understandable to non-MIS people when we moved to XML and got rid of the L and A fields. Can you tell me how ProvSpecDelMonOccur is more comprehensible than A48a?

OK, so that's the outrageous end of [...]

Hi Greta

Do we know who else we're having yet (or at least which organisations?)? Just to make sure we get the right questions to the right people really.

Hi Malcolm

Interesting post, even if I fundamentally disagree with it!

The thing is, the funding agencies allow us to claim funding for learners on the very sensible grounds that if a learner signs a piece of paper (or, hopefully, one day, an electronic screen!) to say they’re telling the truth and they are who they [...]

ha! they tried doing RULES for learner responsive last year and what a mess that turned out to be! there's still MASSES of ambiguity on even quite basic points, so I wouldn't hold your breath…

…of course it could be that after 10 years of arguing the toss over every little bit of funding, I [...]

Hi Greta

Several colleagues are questioning the cost of the conference (and with it, their attendance), I seem to recall the one previously (two years ago?) was free and whilst I realise These Are More Difficult Times, £168 a pop isn’t cheap by any definition, especially as the announcement has come quite late in the “season” [...]

Also, any savings and efficiencies that could be gained are VASTLY outweighed by the amount of time and effort put into getting and maintaining ULNs by providers. Now this was always accepted as an upfront cost to providers, it’s just the lag time to getting the benefits looks like it’s going to be significantly [...]

Story over on FEWeek that gives some rather shocking numbers about the usage of LRS:

http://www.feweek.co.uk/2012/02/03/more-than-14m-learner-accounts-unused/

eeeh, I remember when we got to the millionth ULN…

Paul, this is an incredibly Panglossian view of what is going to happen over the next couple of years. It's going to be CARNAGE.

Whilst the YPLA's consultation and seemingly inevitable move to headcount funding makes a fair amount of sense, the SFA's imposition of a 30 rate matrix is completely unfit for [...]

Hi Greta

I love twitter and use it a lot to talk to like-minded twitterers. The problem I think isn’t with *our* social media policies, it’s with yours (and I’m using “yours” to talk about civil servants in general). It appears to me that you aren’t allowed to really join in with conversations which [...]

that's a lot of hope, moe…

and even if people have made it through the vast jungle of error messages and spent hours building their own reports to check it, how can they have any reasonable idea that their data *is* right? or that SFA will be using the same rules they are regardless of rightness?

I’m hearing that data from the LIS is *already* affecting what providers are paid (or, at best, that providers are having to do a lot of work to prove that LIS reports are wrong to stop them having money taken off them, which amounts to the same thing).

Also remember this isn’t just a “here and [...]

There does seem to be a lack of empathy from SFA over this. I know SFA, DS and IA are all nominally separate bodies, but there seems to be no communication (or at least no communicaiton to providers that they are communicating) between them. Has a bunker mentality taken over at Chelysmore House?

We're in [...]

They're definitely fundable.

I've been saying for ages that they need to re-write the "must be here for three years" bit, because there are so many exceptions to the rule, particularly for 16-18s where the only people you *can't* get funding for are those on study visas, pretty much any other case fits into one or [...]

Hi Amanda

The ILR won't reject it, but you'll need to be able to show to any passing Auditor that the prog awards *are* made up from different units (which should be easy with personal learning records, right?) and you'll get a very grumpy DSAT report about learners being on the same aim twice, but there's [...]

This just in from the Capita conference:

http://twitter.com/#!/capitafhe/status/68250112006168576

LARA beta available next week, LIS beta June and live 15 Jul with funding calcs #capitafhe11

have asked Rob for the source, have a feeling it might be Mr Ashton

i have a feeling that when DataServiceBot says "interface" they mean "look at the information on the website"…

Wow, it looks like LARA has become sentient and started posting…

We know it's not entirely your fault "The Data Service", but we need ALL funding information by January of the year we are going to deliver in (ie four months ago for September starts), because when we don't get info until June we end up [...]