LDNS 2023/24

I thought it was supposed to be by this week, I had a reminder in my calendar to check today. I can only imagine it's imminent. It's now in my calendar to check next Monday. I'm hoping there are no nasty surprises. It's very late in the day to be telling the teaching teams they need to pick new qualifications.

Thanks Ruth Canham-James.  

Perhaps Henry Wish could confirm this for us (please, Henry)?  

A colleague In Another Place was suggesting it was about this time last year, we were rather hoping that the 14 April update might have them in, but seemingly not, which implies, per the schedule, nothing for another fortnight at least:

Data collection maintenance schedule for 2022 to 2023 - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

Not heard anything official though.

Ruth Canham-James I was looking at the Operational end date for a couple of our L1 Animal Care aims that seem to be Dec '24, which are giving me the fear, probably a good place to start, should be relatively easy to check in the LARS mdb?

Steve Hewitt Yes, except I have no idea how to check our learning aims against the mdb except one at a time (I'm no programmer, and I don't see the point of learning Access). I really need to ask our developers to build me something that ties together the latest mdb and our own course data, I should have done that years ago. In the meantime, I've made a spreadsheet I can plug the CSVs and our own data into to get some useful dates. Wouldn't it be nice if ESFA produced something that you plug your own learning aims into that looked up the relevant Validity, LDNS and category Effective To dates. I guess everyone would want different stuff though.

Henry Wish Thanks for the information. Are there any plans to move this process to slightly earlier in the year? The end of April gives us very little time to re-plan curriculum delivery should an aim unexpectedly not have its funding extended.

(Is late May *really* Spring? June certainly isn't...)

(I know you're not in charge of it Henry, don't want to shoot the messenger)

Wasn't expecting to see a meteorological vs. astronomical debate on seasons today, but it beats Breaks in Learning

Henry Wish Thanks for your reply.  I have a couple of queries.  

1) When the website is updated, will you be updating the LDNS for all qualifications at the same time?  From what you have written, it looks like it may be a rolling process whereby some quals are updated sooner than others.  

2) For each qualification, will you be updating the LDNS for all funding streams at the same time (AEB, ALL, etc..)?  

Update to my post above, if you are using the LARS mdb to look for Operational End dates, they're in Core_LARS_Validity as "end date", rather than in Core_LARS_LearningDelivery as "Operational End Date" (which is blank for everything except Access to HE).

If you want something quick and dirty to look at, create an mdb that looks at your FIS mdb output and the LARS mdb and do this:

SELECT DISTINCT Valid_LearningDelivery.LearnAimRef, Core_LARS_LearningDelivery.LearnAimRefTitle, Core_LARS_LearningDelivery.NotionalNVQLevelv2, Core_LARS_LearningDelivery.AwardOrgCode, Core_LARS_Validity.ValidityCategory, Core_LARS_Validity.LastNewStartDate, Core_LARS_Validity.EndDate
FROM (Valid_LearningDelivery LEFT JOIN Core_LARS_LearningDelivery ON Valid_LearningDelivery.LearnAimRef = Core_LARS_LearningDelivery.LearnAimRef) LEFT JOIN Core_LARS_Validity ON Core_LARS_LearningDelivery.LearnAimRef = Core_LARS_Validity.LearnAimRef
WHERE (((Core_LARS_Validity.ValidityCategory)="1619_EFA" Or (Core_LARS_Validity.ValidityCategory) Is Null))
ORDER BY Core_LARS_LearningDelivery.LearnAimRefTitle;

Which will pull back all the aims you're currently delivering with title, level and AO.  Note the bold validity category here, this is for Study Progs, can change it to Matrix for (most!!!) AEB (see posts passim about AEB/FCFJ validity nonsense)?

Hello Henry Wish,

Thanks for your reply.  Could you add some further clarification to your answer to question 1, please?  

Will the LDNS for 23/24 be added to all qualifications at the same time?  

If you are to do it on a rolling basis, we won't know which aims are really ending on 31/7/23, and which show 31/7/23 just because you have not changed the date yet.  

In ESFA's defence (and that's not a phrase I say often!), I think it's just about impossible to do 100% of them at once, due to factors beyond their control at Ofqual, from ministers having bright ideas, occasional human error and, increasingly, with GLA/MCAs faffing about... I'd *hope* it was high 90s at once, but I think that's the best we can get?

Steve Hewitt, that's a really good point.  I understand the difficulty of information flow, but as website users, we need to know the difference between:

a) a real LDNS of 31/7/23 (ie the qual is definitely going out of funding), and

b) a temporary LDNS of 31/7/23 (ie the date has not been updated yet).  

Hi Henry Wish, I was just wondering if you can possibly give us any update on the "mid to end of April" timetable you gave us a few weeks ago, please?  

Will the website have any filtering capability to help us to distinguish those quals with a confirmed LDNS of 31/7/23 from those that have not yet been updated?

To support Peter's request - I would also find this incredibly helpful. Our learning programmes team are worrying for our new cohort already hoping to do these quals that we can't get funded for at the moment.

We are at the end of April so is it any day now? 

Also an indicator that it has been updated would definitely be incredibly helpful and means our teams can start working through as and when we know ESFA have updated each one, even if one at a time per say......

Thanks Ems

So, per the schedule here:

Data collection maintenance schedule for 2022 to 2023 - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

Will either be tomorrow or 11 May. Can't see there being an update outside of these planned ones.

does anyone know if there has been any update on this?

TIA

Doesn't look like it yet, although I notice the 28 April LARS mdb download isn't there yet, 14 April still the most recent (I'm not in the habit of checking this, so don't know how usual this is...)

thanks Steve

Hi Henry Wish, 

Will the website be updated with new LDNSes only on the dates shown in the timetable that Steve Hewitt posted earlier today?  (ie Friday 28 April 2023, Thursday 11th May, Thursday 25th May, etc....)

Or, could the LDNSes be updated on any date?  

GREAT NEWS EVERYONE!

Just refreshed the record I was looking at earlier (Pearson L2 FS English) and it's now showing 31/7/24 as LDNS:

https://submit-learner-data.service.gov.uk/find-a-learning-aim/LearningAimDetails/Funding/60342900?academicYear=2223

Thanks :Steve Hewitt.  I've just checked a couple of ours and they have been updated as well.  :) 

I was going to ask you about your comment this morning, when you said that it didn't look like there had been an update:  what did you mean?  Did you mean that you had seen no news? Or did you mean that all the aims you checked still had an LDNS of 31/7/23?

I also pasted the latest csv data into a spreadsheet I made a couple of weeks ago, that looks up all the relevant dates I need from various tables, for just the aims we deliver, and it works beautifully!

Peter Hancock I meant the aims I checked hadn't changed.