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This page lists some of the recent changes to PICS. We also have a list of known issues being investigated.

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titleExpand to see what's coming in the next update to PICS

Learners

  • Learner Validation has been updated to conform to the ESFA 2023 ILR validation rules specification.

  • Added the ability to bulk transition Workflow Statuses and Opportunities. Both of these options were already available for Applicants.

  • When ending a Skills Bootcamp learner via the End Learner process, the Achievement date entered was not being set against the programme aim. Now fixed.

  • It is now possible to delete an individual learning outcome or assessment criteria from a learner record.

Officers

  • Creating and editing officers would allow the role to be skipped. This is not valid, so the role is now a required field.

Reports

  • A new report template has been added: “Applicant Course Session Report”.

  • Running reports which have become “stuck” and are no longer running can now be cancelled using the View All Running Reports button on the Available Reports tab within Reports.

  • The Funding Late Notified template would error when outputting custom relationships as an optional field. Now fixed.

  • The Officer report template would sometimes error when outputting custom relationships as an optional field. Now fixed.

Appointments

  • Filters on calendars with more than one option selected would not work correctly. Now fixed.

Month End

  • The status labels within the funding calculator and funding reconciler have been updated to be consistent with the rest of PICS.

  • Planned funding based on Planned Starts within Funding Forecasting was not respecting mid-year rate changes in the LARS. Now fixed.

Delivery Configuration

  • Contract Items for Skills Bootcamps has a new contract type of “DPS Competition 2”.

Users and Access

  • Two new permissions have been added to allow light users to edit notes for Learners and Applicants.

Workflows

  • It is now possible to give status transition Post Actions a sequence number. Post actions will run in sequence from the lowest number to the highest.

WebForms

  • Added the ability to default file attachments for WebForms. Defaulted files can come from the form owner or the entity the form was created from.

Automations

  • Applicant automations now have an additional filter for Expected End Date.

  • SMS messages can now be scheduled to deliver later in the day for each automation.

Smart Assessor Integration

  • When enrolling a learner you can now select which Smart Assessor Episode to add the qualifications to.

29th January 2024

Learners

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  • Organisation multi record update can now add and remove sites using the new fields: ADDSITES and REMOVESITES. For each column, the code of the site to add or remove must be provided. If more than 1 site needs to be adjusted, then a list of sites can be provided using the * character as a separator.

Smart Assessor Integration

  • Users of PICS Skill Scans from Smart Assessor can now configure what to default the Skills Scan Type for new Smart Assessor learners from the Smart Assessor Integration Settings.

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  • Looking up the value of a provision of type ACE 360 Emp Sector could fail. Now fixed.

Automations

  • Appointment Reminders can now include the Learner or Applicants Main Officer name, email and mobile as a merge field in the message

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  • We can now enable the Advanced Mosaic theme by default for all users upon request

  • HTML Editors would not allow a link to be added correctly. Now fixed.

  • Fields that are always required now have a visual * indicator next to their label.

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  • Signup forms for employers/organisations, now have an option for Invoice Name.

  • Creating an organisation at the same time as providing their main contact record will now display the main contact in the organisation’s officer list.

Appointments

  • Reminder emails now have additional fields to merge, including description, and learner employer.

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  • Fixed the email link to applicant files when generating an applicant offer document.

Officers

  • The filter to show officers with current learners was including officers with current applicants too. Now fixed to just limit to learners.

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  • If a user has found themselves with signatures requested against records that have been deleted, they will now be able to delete the signature request themselves to clean up the request list.

Officers

  • List of organisations linked to an officer now has a status filter.

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  • Fixed a bug where generating an applicant offer document would result in a 404.

Automations

  • Email appointment communication automations now has the ability to also CC Officer Attendees.

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  • ⚠️ Functional Skills results can now be recorded in a more detailed Level.Sublevel format i.e. “Level 1.2”

  • Ward code can now be edited.

  • The Applicant list “Has Course Enrolment” filter now has a “No current or future” option.

Officers

  • Saved searches has been enabled on the Officer list.

  • Filtering on Main Organisation has been added to the Officer list.

  • Filtering on Superior has been added to the main list.

  • Filtering on “Relationships to Current Learners” has been added to the Officer list.

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  • Main Tag has been added as an optional display on Organisation Lists.

  • A Company Registration Number field has been added.

  • Organisation import can now update Name.

  • Email and Phone number are now shown on the list of related Officers.

Officers

  • If a contact is linked to a login account with a blank email address, updating the email address for the contact will now automatically populate the login address.

  • Officer pick lists are now searched by email address, as well as names.

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  • Trainee Assessors are not being included in the Edit Officer OneFile ID form. Now fixed.

  • Smart Assessor integration now has an option to push changes in qualification status up to Smart Assessor.

Reports

Important: Output of Postcode fields has been separated from general Address fields. We will be upgrading your stored reports to include this field if the Address field has been selected but please check the report outputs to ensure this has happened successfully.

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  • A new report template, “User Sites Report” has been added which shows the Sites each user is linked to (or not).

  • Filtering by Status has been added to the User report.

  • Filtering by Site on the User report has been changed to allow “Any of”, “All of”, “None of” options - this will break existing stored reports that have selections in this filter - please check your reports if you have used this. At the time of writing there is 1 customer with 1 report.

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  • The wording of whether a Learner, ILR Aim, Destination & Progression, or Workplace is included in the ILR has been standardised across data entry and reports. The variations of Export Status, Report in ILR etc. are now all referred to as ILR Export Status with options of Include in ILR Export or Withhold from ILR Export. This will need updating in existing reports and documents that use this field.

  • Ending a Break-in-Learning will now copy forward the HHS, DAMs, Subcontractor/Partner UKPRN and Learning Start Date Postcode where appropriate.

  • Actions that change a Learner’s Break-in-Learning status now refresh the whole page to ensure that the correct Start, Cancel, and/or End options are shown.

  • Learner Sex is now an optional for non-ILR Learners.

  • Learner Status filtering now includes an option for “In Learning and Last Year Leavers”.

  • The Learner Reference Number can now be set if there is not already an existing LRN for that learner. This only affects commercial learners who have been stored in PICS for several years, or where a new learning episode has been created for such a learner.

  • Editing the postcode on the ILR Learner Edit screen will now trigger a background update of postcode information.

  • Changes have been made to the ILR validation to reflect the ESFA Validation Rules version 5. These include:

    • New rules LearnDelFamType_108, Fworkcode_07, AchDate_12 and R133.

    • EmpId_13 (Employer ID cannot be 999999999) has been downgraded to a warning.

    • Minimum duration rules for Apprenticeship Standards (DateOfBirth_46 and DateOfBirth_47) are now applied.

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  • Reports will now be aborted if they take more than 2 hours to run.

  • Reports are now limited to 200 optional fields.

  • For outputs linked to organisations, the following fields have been added to help report on the geographic spread of linked organisations: Ward, Ward Name, Region, and Local Authority.

  • Site filters in all reports are now multi select.

  • New Reports

    • A new report, Contracts Report, has been added to report against contracts.

    • A new report, ESF Contracting Report, has been added to report against ESF Supplementary Data.

  • Learner Report:

    • Performance improvements have been made to populating fields defined on the base Learner report.

    • Performance improvements have been made to populating UDF fields.

    • Filtering by Apprenticeship Service Status has been added.

    • Output of Age Band has been added to show the current Age Band.

    • Output of Programme SSA Tier 1 Title has been added.

    • Output Programme SSA Title has been renamed to Programme SSA Tier 2 Title. This will need updating in existing reports and documents that use this field.

    • Output of Source Applicant ID has been added.

    • Output of ILR EPA Organisation ID and Location have been added.

    • Output of the “Current LSF” field has been fixed. It was previously showing “Any LSF”.

    • Output of Start / End Reported Period fields has been added.

  • Learner Assessment Report

    • There were 2 fields name Title - for the Learner honorific and the Assessment Title - which could cause errors. The Assessment Title field has been renamed “Assessment Title”. This will need updating in existing reports and documents that use this field.

  • ILR Learner Report

    • Non ILR Funding Organisation can be included in this report - you must specify the Funding Organisations to include in the report options.

    • Filtering by ILR Employment Status has been added. This will return Learners that have any Employment records with the selected Statuses

    • Filtering by ILR Employment Monitoring has been added. This will return Learners that have any Employment Monitoring with any of the selected values.

  • Learner ILR Aims Report

    • Non ILR Funding Organisation can be included in this report - you must specify the Funding Organisations to include in the report options.

    • Non ILR Aims can be included in this report - you must specify the Aim Types to include in the report options.

    • Filtering by “Aim records added between dates” has been added.

    • Filtering by “Aim records with completion fields changed between dates” has been added. The fields are End Date, Completion Status, Learning Outcome, and Employment Outcome. Achieve date is also included on Programme Aims.

    • Output of EPA Organisation Location has been added.

    • Output of HE fields has been added.

  • Reviews Report

    • Output of Count of Attached Files has been added.

  • Change Request Report

    • Filtering by the Date the request was rejected has been added.

    • Output of the Date the request was rejected has been added.

    • Output of the User who rejected the request was has been added.

  • QAR Report

    • A new report type has been added: Apprenticeship Component Aims. This allows you to report across all apprenticeship component aims instead of just the programme aims. This is the equivalent of the “Report on comp aims (not prog aims)” option in desktop reports.

    • Completion, Retention and Pass totals and charts are now available for all report types, not just Education and Training reports. A new menu to select the type of table you wish to display has been added to allow this to be selected.

    • Achievement Rate forecasting (minimum and maximum rates) has been added to the QAR report. This will calculate a maximum learner total based on learners who are still in learning and could potentially still achieve, this is added to the existing achievement rate. Maximum rates assume that all of these learner will achieve, minimum rates assume that none of them will. A new menu to select the type of table you wish to display has been added to allow this to be selected. Any existing reports must be re-run to calculate the forecasting data.

    • New QAR reports will default to use the Interactive output mode. Existing saved reports are unaffected.

    • Output of Outcome Grade has been added. This is taken from the Main Aim for reports based on Programme Aims.

    • The QAR report can now be filtered by Site, Contract, UKPRN, or ILR Export Status for learners and aims.

    • The QAR dataset now includes a QAR Notes output which provides helpful notes when the overall year is modified due to events such as overdue planned breaks, or programme aims at EPA.

  • Learner Timeliness report. This is a new report which shows the time taken to enter key dates on a learner or aim, such as start, end, or achievement. It also includes changes to key dates to allow better monitoring of when these changes occur.

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  • It is now possible to set the Session flag in the Attendance editing form.

  • It is now possible to select multiple Course records and set the status.

  • It is now possible to create Off-the-job Training hours Contact records from a Session’s Attendance.

Officers

  • It is now possible to select multiple records and add the same Note to them all.

  • The End date field has been added to the Additional details.

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  • Notes have been added to Attendance recording.

Officers

  • The officers tab now allows adding Superiors and Direct Reports.

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  • Many fields in the Organisation list are now optional.

  • An optional Roles field has been added to the Organisations list.

  • Organisations list now has filters for “Has Head Office”, “Has Branches“.

  • Contract Numbers for ESFA Agreement IDs are now limited to 6 characters to match the Apprenticeship Service specification.

Officers

  • Many fields in the Officer list are now optional.

  • An optional Roles field has been added to the Officer list.

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