Release 4.24

Apprenticeship enrolments

To help simplify apprenticeship enrolments, we are developing a new process that will help both in reducing effort and highlighting compliance issues. The new enrolment form will provide warnings and guidance relating to minimum duration (including for part-time learners) and off-the-job hours.

Please note that to edit the programme details for a user that has been enrolled onto a programme you will need to have the new role "Edit Programme Details".

For more information see: Enrolling learners onto a programme.

Sub-programmes

Sub-programmes provide the ability to manage learning plan content more easily. They allow you to separate learning plan content that may be used across multiple programmes such as functional skills. They also make it significantly easier to manage variations in learning plan content due to prior achievement or based upon assessment results.

As an example, you can create sub-programmes for each maths and English delivery model that you have. You can also use sub-programmes to add optional qualifications to a learning plan only where needed.

Please note that this release will provide the ability for our customers to start creating their sub-programmes. The ability to enrol learners onto sub-programmes will be included in the April release as originally planned.

For more information see: Introduction to sub-programmes.

Multiple learner groups

Groups management in Aptem provides a powerful way to organise and manage your learners. In this release, we are making it even more powerful by allowing you to have multiple group hierarchies and to add a learner to a group within each hierarchy. Using this feature, administrators will find it even easier to operationally manage learners, control access to information, and simplify reporting. 

For more information see: Adding a learner to one or more groups.

Tutor console updates

Over the coming months we will continue to update the tutor console with further functionality. This update will include the following items:

Learner dashboard (Tutor view)

This was partially released last month as a beta. The latest version of the dashboard includes some improvements to the existing panels and adds the following additional panels:

• Upcoming reviews
• Timeline
• RAG Status
• Requires attention

Trackers

Trackers allow you to document and internally manage cases for your learner's ILRs, compliance or other aspect of the learner journey. A tracker can be created for a learner and you can choose to allocate queries, checks or actions to other Administrators (via a notification) or for yourself.

We have enabled the ability to create and manage these for a learner from the tutor console.
For more information see: Trackers - Overview.

Reviews

We've updated reviews in the tutor console to include the remaining panels relating to gateway, End Point Assessment and Learning Styles Questionnaire.

Improvements to the prior learning interface

We are making updates to the way in which we capture prior learning so that we can make it easier for customers to identify prior achievement levels for learners. This will be followed up with a further update in the April release that will automatically calculate the prior attainment level and support in the identification of learner’s that are exempt from Functional Skills.

Removal of gender from registration and profile

We have removed the mandatory gender question from the registration and profile pages as this is not mandatory for commercial learners or for jobseekers. It is now possible for a learner to answer this field in the ILR step of an onboarding wizard.

Updates to the Funding Dashboard

We have made further updates to the Aptem funding dashboard. The updates aim to match the output of the Funding Information System (FIS).  In particular, we have added:

• The Adult Skills funding calculation
• A new ‘Headline’ page which displays a table comparable to the FIS Summary Funding Report, with funding per month split by: on programme, Functional Skills, balancing payments, Learning Support payments and Outcome payments
• The phasing of monthly payments for apprenticeships, traineeships, study programme and adult skills exactly matching those generated by FIS
• The correct calculation and phasing of balancing payments where a learner successfully completes a programme early
• An updated Learner Funding Data table, where each aim line is tagged with the appropriate FIS Funding line category, which enables comparison to the FIS Occupancy report
• Projected achievement funding for leaners who are yet to complete is now split into:
  • projected outcome funding for learners still on programme (as shown in FIS), and
  • potential lost outcome payments for learners who are out of funding (i.e. gone past their planned end date) but yet to complete and achieve (this value is omitted from the FIS Occupancy and Summary reports)

Updates to the APIs

Organisation APIs

We will be making some improvements to the APIs for managing organisation records to help with the integration of other systems, such as a CRM system. The following fields will be made available to include when creating, updating, or returning an organisation record.

• Status - this will be one of the following statuses: Confirmed, Opportunity, Archived
• Apprenticeship Agreement Id - this will be an optional field
• Levy Payer - this will be returned as a true or false
• Website - this will be an optional field
• Reference Number - You will be able to use this to capture a third party reference for the organisation record. For example, this could be the id used in the CRM system of the corresponding organisation record.

Groups APIs

With the release of the "Multiple learner groups" we have made updates to our APIs to support managing a learner belonging to more than one group. If you make use of our APIs please contact our support team who can provide you with a copy of the latest API documentation.

Training/assessment price

It's now also possible to set the training/assessment price for a learner via the API.

Minor updates

• Removal of metrics from tiles in Aptem classic:
  As part of our improvements to performance we have made the decision to remove the metrics that show on the tiles menu. The newly released Tutor console replaces these metrics for unread messages and documents requiring signing with the new learner dashboard providing a view of items requiring attention at a learner-level. Later this year, Caseload Dashboards in the console will provide a more comprehensive view of metrics with in-built drill downs for viewing the related records. 
• We have added the ability to create repeated learning plan components within a learning plan from programme builder. This speeds up the process where you want to add a review on a recurring basis.
• We have now added the hours planned to the attendance record template.