Updates relating to Reviews re-architecture

We are implementing a series of improvements to Aptem’s Review functionality, to reduce your administrative burden and ensure Aptem helps you to remain compliant. These changes are based on customer feedback and to support the new funding rules that state a review must be carried out for apprentices every 12 weeks, to discuss progress against their training plan.

Following the update, statuses across Learning Plan components, Review Instances and Review meeting tasks will be aligned, to ensure you have a clear and consistent view of the Review status for each learner. Whenever a change is made to the Review status in any one of these three areas, the other areas will automatically be updated to reflect this change. This will make it easier for you to track when reviews are due for each learner, and will remove the need for your teams to manually keep these statuses aligned.  

These updates set up the reviews functionality to be scalable, and enable future features, like surfacing further data via OData.

To view a detailed list of changes, please see: Updates relating to Reviews re-architecture.

Completion of Programme Process Automation Tracker

The ‘Completion of Programme’ process automation updates all the necessary learner information when a learner completes their apprenticeship. The process will help to eliminate the possibility of errors in re-keying and will reduce the associated administrative effort in updating the relevant areas of the system.

This feature impacts Training Providers with Apprenticeship delivery programmes. Where customers opt for this feature, this process automation will be applicable to any learners on an apprenticeship delivery programme and with a programme status of 'Active' or 'Entered EPA'. Note that the ability to create and edit the tracker will be available in Aptem Console only.

The ‘Completion of Programme’ process automation will update the learner’s ILR details and Programme Status to ensure the learner's practical period and/ or the assessment period of their apprenticeship has been completed.

For more information, see: Completion of programme.

Note: To enable this process automation for your tenant, contact the Support team, or the Customer Success team, or your implementation consultant.

Update to API documentation

The Aptem API documentation has now been split into two formats:

• The API specification can be found here: https://aptem.co.uk/api.html.
• The API user support section has been re-organized. See: https://support.aptem.co.uk/hc/en-gb/sections/360004998279-Using-our-APIs. In future releases, we will be adding additional content to this section.

Minor updates / Bug fixes

The following is the list of minor updates and bug fixes made in the January release or in patches / minor releases made since the last release:

• The value against the "Past End Date - under 180 days" field in the Power BI Report on Accountability Framework was showing incorrect data. This has now been resolved.
• Previously, the compliance dashboard only looked for the commitment statement, and not the training plan. This has now been addressed, and the training plan has now been added to the compliance dashboard.
• When creating a task, and adding in a telephone number, UK phone numbers could not be saved without adding the '+' sign. This issue has been resolved and UK phone numbers can now be saved without the ‘+’ sign.
• The 'JCP Referrer' field has been added to the User table in OData. This field is prefixed with the string: 'User_PrAP'.
• In case of a piece of evidence that was ‘Referred’, but had been quality assured and was ‘QA Verified’, the system showed an incorrect status on the summary/export screen in the Tutor view. This has been resolved, and now the system shows the evidence status as ‘Referred’ in this scenario.
• In a particular case, clicking on the End-Point Assessment tab on the Learner profile was leading to an error message. This issue has now been resolved.
• In a particular case, inaccurate and inconsistent totals were being displayed in the Caseload Power BI Occupancy report. These issues have now been resolved.
• Administrators can now record an unfunded apprentice in the ILR, this enables admins to report them to the ESFA to allow the EPAO to apply for the apprentice’s certificate.
• A customer reported that when they created cloned versions of their workshops and removed the documents of the original workshop from the cloned versions, the deleted documents from the original workshop were still visible. This bug has now been fixed.
• In the Assessment Plan section on the End-Point Assessment tab of the Learner profile, UI improvements have been made to ensure that the booking history and scheduled date for each element is clear. Elements have been organized into an accordion, and the booking/re-booking scheduling history can be viewed within an accordion. All accordions are collapsed by default. The expanded view looks like the following:
  

Upcoming features/fixes

We wish to give advance notice of the following changes that are planned to be implemented in the upcoming February 2023 release.

Updated UVAC Training Plan in line with the guidance from UVAC

UVAC have issued a new template which has been extensively reworked to comply with the new funding rule requirements.

Since the changes are structural and cannot be applied to the current template, Universities will need to recreate the compliance document.

Based on the published UVAC template, a new 'UVAC - Components Plan v3' Compliance Document will be created and placed in the new 'Training Plan' section.

Following are the high-level changes:

• Updates to the text in specific places
• Updates to various sections including how RPL is recorded
• Updates to Annex A and Annex B
• Addition of the Apprenticeship Delivery Summary

The UVAC - Components Plan v3 will be enabled for all relevant tenants automatically. The system will restrict Learning Plan access until the UVAC - Components Plan v3 document has been signed.

Resolve online/offline users' connection tracking problem for ILRHub

In Aptem Classic, in cases where the same ILR is already open and being edited by an administrator, the system displays the ILR in read-only mode. and a message on the screen notifies the user that the ILR is currently not available for making any changes. This message is currently displayed on the learner grid on the ILR screen, and on the ILR record.

You can see an example of the message displayed on the right side of one of the displayed records in the learner grid below:

In the February release, we will be removing the message shown in the image above. We are removing this message from the learner grid on the ILR tile as this functionality has a negative effect on system performance.

Note that the message will still be displayed on the ILR record, and the ILR record will still be read-only while it is being edited by another administrator. The warning message on the ILR record will still be show, as shown below.