16-19 EFA - Withdrawal prior to May GCSE Exams

Completed achieved if all elements were sat and a grade obtained. I'd be making sure they had sufficient attendance/learning as well for the qualifying period  as well.

Steven Edmondson What Actual End Date would you record? The exam date or last date of attendance? If the latter, do you hide that attendance with auditors, or have you found they are ok with attendance after AED? I can't decide what I think is right in Aashish's scenario.

Usually the exam, as I believe this matches the ILR criteria of the AED being the last date "learning activities necessary to achieve the learning aim".

Steven Edmondson Ruth Canham-James - Thank you both for your incredibly quick response. 

Steven, using the exam date as the AED would make things alot easier, but I know previously we went by last day of learning rather than exam date, as there isnt any 'real' learning taking place on exam day. Thoughts?

Understandable but I think as the ILR spec says activity necessary to complete it's fine. I've also incorporated the logic used in apprentice functional skills completions and the guidance on recording HE completions when considering this. We've had a number of internal audits over the years and hasn't been raised as an issue.

That's good to know. Have you been through a scenario where you've been asked to evidence attendance in the exam? We do tend to record this, but certainly not as officially as a class register

We do have the records for this yes, plus they would ask for evidence of the learner achievement as well usually.

And a final question (hopefully): Some of these withdrawals have achieved a grade 3 or below in the November series. Now they were enrolled to, of course, be achieving grade 4 or above. So would you still be be marking them with the grade they achieved? I would imagine it to be the case, to make sure that their achievement is recorded on their PLR, but just wanted certainty around it to clarify to our Exams team

I agree with Steven about AED, exams definitely count.

Thanks Steven Edmondson for your reply. I'm going to speak to my colleagues about this, we might have some Nov resits who didn't get a 4+ then went on to withdraw, that we could perhaps record as the grade they achieved.

Aashish Dhruv We'd definitely record the grade they achieved if we did this. What you report in your ILR feeds the PLR data, so it's good to provide that history.

No worries, definitely worth doing to protect your figures a bit. You have incurred the costs of onboarding, an amount of learning plus all awarding body fees so I think it's very reasonable. Obviously if you have loads of learners coming in and backsliding on grades auditors will be wanting to understand what's going on.

Turns out we had two, but it was actually an admin error and we do normally record the grade achieved from the Nov exams when they withdraw later in the year, so thanks Aashish Dhruv for asking the question leading me to finding this error 😊