Page Comparison

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

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21st March

Learners and Applicants

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• SaaS user type is now a column on the user list.

• Indicator on the User Summary Screen if 2FA is required at system level.

Vacancies

• New sort option on Vacancy list for the “Closes” field.

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• When copying a WebForm design, it is now possible to change the type of the copied form. Note that any fields not compatible with the new form type will be removed from the copy.

Vacancies

• The Vacancy Edit form’s list of Contacts was not being limited to those for the selected Employer. Now fixed.

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• Added the overall learner status field when viewing Cognassist assessment results.

22nd November 2023

API

• Added an “All” option to the learning status filter. The “In Learning“ status will still be the default but this should allow form much easier searching when using date filters that fall outside of the Learner’s start/end dates.

• The Learning Status filter options were not displaying correctly in the Swagger documentation. Now fixed.

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• Fixed a date format error that was appearing when creating a record in Cognassist.

• Fixed an issue where assessment details was not updating from Cognassist.

6th November 2023

API

• Sites can now be used to restrict which Learners, Applicants, Officers and Organisations an API user can see and interact with.

• Added an end point to Lists and Types that shows what Sites are available to the current user account.

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• The LRS integration now uses the latest LRS client certificate, expiring in November 2024. You do not need to action any requests from the LRS to update your certificate as this is handled automatically by PICS.

Vacancies

• When editing a vacancy, the list of Contacts would not always be of those related to the Employer. Now fixed.

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• Fixed an issue when using the Return To Entity setting would redirect to a location the user did not have access to.

Courses

• Uploading additional files to a course session could result in a bad request error. Now fixed.

• URLs for signup forms to auto enrol applicants onto a course can now be generated from the Course summary screen.

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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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• When configuring workflow validation and actions, we now offer a drop down of static values when appropriate.

Courses

• When creating new course enrolments, we were not correctly filtering out learners/applicants with existing enrolments. Now fixed.

19th September 2023

Courses

• It is now possible to generate a URL for an applicant signup form from with a course instance summary using the Actions menu.

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• A summary view has been added for tasks to allow notes and attachments to be added to the Task.

Courses

• Searching for courses to enrol a person onto will now correctly sort when mixing Online and Offline courses.

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• General

  • Saved Reports list can now be sorted by Type, Created, or Name.

  • Appointment Description has been added to all Appointment reports.

  • Output of just the code values for User Defined Dropdown and Checklist fields has been added.

  • Database Administrators can now see all running reports from the Available reports tab, and abort them if required.

  • Duration can now be output for calls in all Communications reports.

  • Created By User information can now be output in all Files reports.

• Learner

  • 🆕 a Learner ILR Aim FAMs report has been added.

  • 🆕 a Learner Vacancy Application report has been added.

  • ILR Learning Aim Report generation has been optimised.

  • ILR Destination & Progression Report generation has been optimised.

  • ILR Learner Report - Output of Actual OTJ Hours is now available.

  • Learner Component Report - Filtering by Component Type and Stage is now available.

  • Learner Component Report - Sampling Method now included in IQA summary.

  • Learner Sessions Report - Output of Attendance Notes is now available.

  • Episode Original Start and Learning Original Start dates can now be output on all Learner reports.

  • Reviews report can now be filtered to reviews that are Late or Overdue by a range of days.

  • Reviews report can now output the number of days Late or Overdue a review is.

  • Reviews report can now output if a review was Late or is Overdue.

  • Learner Data Changes report can now be filtered to records that have the Learner Main Qualification Reference in the Extra Key.

  • Learner Data Changes report can now be filtered Learner Achieved Target field.

  • City & Guilds Status can now be output in ILR Aim and Qualifications reports.

  • Prior Year Partner UKPRN can now be output in ILR Aim reports.

  • Needs Authorisation, Has Attachment and Unique ID are now available for output on Learner Change Request reports.

  • Contract code is now available for output.

  • Other System ID is now available for output.

  • More ILR Work Placement details are available for output on Placements reports.

• Applicants

  • 🆕 a Applicant Vacancy Application report has been added.

  • Created By User information can now be output.

• Forms

  • Form Report generation has been optimised.

  • Filtering by Form Template is now available.

  • Form IDs are now a navigation link in interactive reports / dashboards.

• Officer

  • Task Report - Output of Regarding and Done By Types and IDs is now available.

• Projected Funding

  • Projected Funding By Learner Report - Two new optional outputs, “Total Episode Funding” and “Total Programme Funding” have been added.

  • Projected Funding By Learning Delivery Report - Two new optional outputs, “Total Aim Funding” and “Total Programme Funding” have been added.

• Courses

  • The Course Session Attendance Summary report is now available. This allows you to see a summary of course attendance records broken down by type (present, late absent). The report is also available for use in dashboard widgets.

  • For Qualification details are now available for output.

Vacancies

• The current user will be defaulted to the officer when they create a vacancy application.

• Additional filters added for applications for Has CV Sent, Has Application Sent, Has Ended.

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• 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.

Courses

• ⚠️ Column visibility on the Course list is now user controlled.

• A Main Tag optional field is now available on the Course list.

• Delivered For & Delivered By are now available on the Course list as optional fields and filters.

• My Courses Only user permission has been renamed to View My Courses, this is now the required permission to see courses. View Courses has been renamed to View All Courses.

• Users without View All Courses permission were not able to see any courses they created if Course Leader was not set to themselves after creating the course. Now fixed.

• Users without View All Courses permissions was not restricting course base reports to just their courses. Now fixed.

Vacancies

• Vacancy Applications now has bulk editing of more fields including Start & End dates, Contact & Officer and Outcome.

• Vacancies & Vacancy Applications lists can now be filtered by Employer.

• The Vacancy Application list now respects the sites of the linked Learner or Applicant record in Strict Site mode.

• ⚠️ The Vacancy Applications list is now filtered by the Vacancy’s Employer Sites in Strict Site Mode.

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• It is now possible to link existing Applicants and Learners to an Opportunity using the “Link People” item on the Action menu in the Opportunity Summary.

Courses

• When enrolling people onto a course it was possible for them to be enrolled twice. Now fixed.

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• Updating Imports of Applicant records could be very slow if a significant number of User Defined Field answers were recorded for the records being updated. This has been significantly improved.

• Single record Updating Imports of an Applicant will now perform the update rather than starting the interactive new Learner process.

Courses

• The Tutor picklist on Session bulk edit is now correctly filtered by role.

• Session Status is now displayed on Session lists.

• Filtering by Session Status, Course Leader and Session Has/hasn’t Enrolments have been added to Session lists.

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• Document generation support has been added for Opportunities.

• The Opportunities list can now have the fields displayed specified by the user.

• The Main Tag optional field has been added to the Opportunities List.

Vacancies

• ⚠️ Important: In Strict Site Mode vacancies will only be visible to a user if the User has any of the Sites associated with the Employer Organisation linked to the Vacancy.

• The Employer Organisation can now be specified when adding a Vacancy.

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• Surveys for PICS are now available in BETA for anyone with an existing eSurveys licence.

Vacancies

• Vacancy matching lists now have an Export to Excel option in the search filters More drop down.

Courses

• It is now possible to copy sessions forward every X weeks, rather than every week.

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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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• Site is now an optional column of the Applicant List.

• Postcode is now an optional column of the Applicant List.

• Government Cap for Apprenticeship Standard is now show on the Financial Details.

Courses

• Session list can now be filtered by Site.

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• Funding Calculations:

  • The funding calculator was excluding learners that have validation errors. They are now included.

  • FM36 Apprentices eligible for “National Skills Fund: Level 3 Adult Offer” were being assigned the wrong disadvantage uplift. Now fixed.

  • Balancing payments were not being paid for some Apprenticeship Standards on completion of their End Point Assessment. Now fixed.

  • The FM36 funding calculation was sometimes calculating framework uplifts incorrectly where residual TNPs had been added. Now fixed.

  • The FM36 funding calculation was withholding employer incentives for apprentices aged under 19 when they were recorded as a care leaver. Now fixed.

  • The projected funding calculation for FM36 apprentices was setting the effective date of overdue unpaid PMR derived claims to the PMR record’s expected date. This was resulting in the items not appearing in the Projected Funding reports. The effective date is now projected to be in the next unfinalled period.

• Funding Reconciliation:

  • The “Price Episode Actual End Date” column has been added to the report generated by the Apprenticeship Data Match reconciler.

• Additional filtering options have been added to ESF Contracting.

• The QAR Reconciler is now available. This allows an ESFA QAR data extract to be uploaded and a report is produced showing any differences between the ESFA data and the PICS QAR data. A new QAR Reconciler permission has been created to restrict its use - this will need to be assigned by a database administrator before it will become visible.

Courses

• Session GLH will now be defaulted based on the start and end time when creating a session

• Added GLH to the export to excel function for the course sessions list

• Total Sessions GLH has been added to the course summary page for Fixed Start Date Courses, this will sum up all the Sessions GLH for that course to compare with the Course Total GLH

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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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• More values have been added to Apprenticeship Service status to make managing records easier.

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

• Most Recent Status Change has been added as an optional field and sort order on the Applicant list.

Courses

• 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.

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

Vacancies

• Recruit An Apprentice vacancies have a new tab for selecting the qualifications candidates should have.

• Recruit An Apprentice tab has had a significant rework and many fields have been changed or removed to match the new API Specification

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• A field has been added for recording Delivery Location for Applicants. This is available for use in WebForms, Reports, Sign up forms and Imports.

• The organisations tab now allows adding Employer, School, College, Recruitment Agency and Delivery Location.

• The officers tab now allows adding Main Officer, Mentor and Recruited by.

Courses

• Notes have been added to Attendance recording.

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• An optional field for EDS reference has been added.

• A filter for EDS reference has been added.

• The organisations tab now allows adding Head Offices and Branches.

Vacancies

• Recruit an Apprentice vacancies and their upload status are now indicated on the Vacancies List.

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