A series of webinars covering key data fields for higher education students in the Individualised Learner Record (ILR).
There are many common misunderstandings in how the higher education data in the Individualised Learner Record (ILR) should be reported and for many further education colleges the use of ILR data by the Office for Students remains a mystery.
This series of six webinars will provide:
- explanations of how the data should be returned
- information on the key ILR fields used by the OfS and how they are used
- best practice and suggestions for systems and processes.
Week five: Student engagement part two
This webinar continued to look at student engagement. It covered:
- definitions of key fields:
- TYPEYR
- YEARSTU
- FUNDLEV
- FUNDCOMP
- Outcome
- Outgrade
- what we use these for
- what we expect from providers in determining these
- evidence that should be kept
- common issues found
- examples
- improving data quality.
Watch the webinar
See the slides
Questions and answers
Questions and answers from the session are provided below.
YEARSTU should reflect the year of the student for the year of instance, therefore it should be updated once the student has passed the anniversary of their start date, even if this is part way through the reporting year.
We can confirm that the only use of FUNDCOMP in 2019-20 will be to exclude students from the HESES population using FUNDCOMP=9. This is confirmed in the OfS’s exceptional guidance for the 2019-20 ILR data.
Yes, as they have submitted/attempted the chronologically final assessment (as long as all other module final assessments have been attempted).
FUNDCOMP needs to be determined for each year of instance. The 18 month long course therefore needs to be broken into two years of instance, the first being 12 months long (January to December) and the second being six months long (January to June).
In the first ILR return the student will only be part way through their year of instance and so FUNDCOMP=3 would be returned unless they had already failed to complete by the point the ILR was submitted.
In the second ILR return the student will have completed their second year of instance and so FUNDCOMP = 1 or 2 should be returned as appropriate for the second year of instance.
If the student is only inactive for part of the year then YEARSTU should increment on their anniversary.
If they are dormant for a whole year of the course then this is when you shouldn’t increment it.
We strongly encourage all fields to be completed for any students studying at Level 4 or above.
If you have any questions about the ILR webinar series, please contact [email protected].
See the ILR specification, validation rules and appendices 2019 to 2020.
See our privacy notice for OfS Zoom webinars.