Nationality

You legitimately don't have to return *anything* for CL, of course ;) Every field can be unknown/blank (except sex)...

Haven't got my archive in front of me but I'm not sure Nationality/Country of Birth have ever been *mandatory* for FE (Nationality was for HE learners), which is slightly different from whether it's a good idea to collect it or not....

We always collect Nationality for purposes of checking fundability. It also enables us to put in validation to make sure we've recorded stuff like visa info for any non Brits. We've never collected Country of Birth, it's not relevant to anything I can think of.

I guess and perhaps a little more useful post-br*xit, but do you not get a bunch of people putting their heritage, eg Pakistan or Nigeria, even if they're UK Nationals? I've certainly had that in the past so would be a bit edgy about using it to validate anything?

Surprisingly, not often an issue. If they declare their Nationality as something not British, we then ask for a visa type or share code, and they soon realise the mistake. The inputters also spot mistakes when we see a copy of their passport, and just update it where it's clearly wrong.

It's only internal validation, and we have time to sort it. We just need to make sure we have covered 100% of our students' eligibility. Literally every student who's Nationality is not UK, we have to enter a visa type. We added Settled and Pre-settled status to that list for the EU students.