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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3rd July

Courses

• When enrolling learners and applicants onto a course, we now give you the opportunity to set your search filters before we perform the search for suitable courses.

User Defined Forms

• URL questions that contained the & symbol between parameters would not work correctly. Now fixed.

27th June

Month End

• The Skills Bootcamp Occupancy funding reconciler was throwing the error “Cannot get a text value from a bool cell”. Now fixed

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• It is now possible to schedule email notifcations for Applicants, Learners, Reviews, Appointments and Enrolments at a specific time of day instead of 05:00. This feature was already available when sending SMS messages.

19th June

User Defined Forms

• Editing the code for a multiple answer question could result in a loss of date. This is no restricted by preventing the code for existing answers to be changed when editing the design of a question.

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• The data capture Learner and Aim Provider Monitoring field names have been adjusted to align with the ILR Learner and Aim reports.

Courses

• A new Course Type filter is now available on the Sessions list.

• Two new course filters have been added when enrolling a learner or applicant on a course: Delivered By and Delivered For.

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• The validation of National Insurance Numbers has been improved - entered values must now end in A, B, C or D in accordance with HMRC guidance.

User Defined Forms

• A new location has been added for User Defined Forms: Learner Qualifications. This location can be set for any UDF where Leaner is selected in the Form For field, and will be shown in the Qualification Summary page, and Qualification Tracking tab for ILR learning aims. Visibility filters for Qualification Reference, Qualification Type and ILR Qualification Type are available.

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• Organisation and Opportunity workflows can now be set to be the default for all new instances of the entity.

• Available status transitions are now shown in alphabetical order. The same as on the Transitions configuration page.

User Defined Forms

• The UDF description is now shown on the index page.

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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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• It is now possible to clone widgets within a dashboard. Widget options have been moved to a menu and a Clone Widget option has been added.

User Defined Forms

• ID label in URLs will now work in Edit mode as well as View mode.

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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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• 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.

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• Clone and retiring any Webform would error if any Create Form Workflow actions had been created but had a status of Incomplete. Now fixed.

User Defined Forms

• The validation for checking if all single and multi select answers had a code set would give an error. Now fixed.

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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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• Checkboxes for contact methods should now be more reliable.

• Added Main Aim Level and Next of Kin fields to Learner Change Request and Learner File forms.

• The Qualification Plan control should now be saving the current state correctly regardless of dates or Aim types.

• Learner form Officer contact details should now be populating correctly.

• Added the ability to download a copy of the template used to create a WebForm design. This should help when the original has been lost.

• When Strict Site Mode is enabled, form designs can no longer be saved if no sites are selected.

• If Strict Site Mode is enabled and the logged in user account has site restrictions, the user’s sites are automatically defaulted on any new form designs.

User Defined Forms

• Single and multi select questions will no longer allow quotation marks (“), asterisks (*), duplicates in the code section.

• Single and multi select questions will no longer allow empty codes.

• Single and multi select questions will no longer allow quotation marks (“) in the description section.

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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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• New option to just add a survey record to a Learner/Applicant/Officer. And then once added, a system user can manually add the answers on the other persons behalf.

• When survey reminders are sent, we now record the number of reminders that have been sent and display this count in the list view.

User Defined Forms

• Fields can now be marked dormant to hide them from data capture and reporting.

• It is now possible to configure forms for Tasks

• Help tooltips are not supported on header and group questions

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• Output of just the Qualification Plan code is now available.

User Defined Forms

• It is now possible to configure visibility restrictions for User Defined Forms

• User Defined Forms now have a summary page

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• 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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• 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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