DfE Connect guide

What is DfE Connect?

 DfE Connect allows users to access DfE services and guidance relating to finance and funding. For example, manage tasks such as school census and accounts return and view deadlines, policy updates and best practice guides.

Who can use this service

DfE Connect is for school business professionals working in pre-16 academies, including:

• academy trust professionals
• chief operating officers
• finance officers
• school leaders

How to register for the service

DfE Connect is currently available for all pre-16 academies. It provides an overview of upcoming mandatory finance and funding tasks for pre-16 academies and links to wider help and support. If you are a pre-16 academy you will be able to access the service ‘DfE Connect’ directly using your DfE Sign in account. Other than having a DfE Sign in account for a pre-16 academy, there is no pre-registration requirements.

Accessing the service

To access DfE Connect, you will need to access at an individual pre-16 academy level for one of the schools within your trust. Accessing at trust level is not currently available.

One of the developments we are looking at for DfE Connect is being able to provide a trust-level view of relevant information for the trust and the academies within them.

FAQs

Q. When trying to access the service using my multi academy trust details, I get an error message explain I am unable to use the service

Currently our service is only available at academy/school level.

Therefore, to gain access you will need to sign in via “DfE sign in” under a school within your trust. If you only have access via “DfE Sign in” under the trust account, you will need to request access for the school instead.

Q. Is there a way that I can have the service listed in each school automatically rather than having to sign into DfE Connect then DfE Sign in and selecting a school.

DfE Connect has been set up with access at school level only as part of its initial launch. This means that currently the only way to switch schools is signing out and back in as a different school.Currently the content we show for each school is the same regardless of the school you are signed in as.

As DFE Connect develops further, we are looking at how we can implement a multi academy trust level access, with the ability of offering multi school access through the system.

If you need further information and/or assistance please contact the team using our Customer Help portal- Customer Help Portal