This guide is here to help you prepare for the new ESFA contract year and the updates PICS during this time.

The last maintenance release of PICS 15.00 will be 18th July. Once this version has been released, we will begin the significant task of upgrading PICS for the 2017/18 contract. As a result, there will be a short period of time where we simply can’t make changes to the current software.

Significant Dates

18/07 – The last update of PICS 15.00, which will contain significant upgrade changes
18/07 – We are hoping to release a blank ILR form for printing and data capture  
15/08 – First release of PICS 15.10, which will migrate your learner data in accordance with the 2017/18 ILR specification 
14/09 – R13 closes 
19/10 – R14 closes: absolute deadline for 2016/17 data

Recording new Learners for 2017/18

This year, as with last, the changes to the ILR are so minimal that we don’t see any issue with adding new year starts to PICS in advance of PICS 15.10 being released, providing you’re on at least PICS 15.00.017.00. After the data migration performed when upgrading to PICS 15.10 is released in the middle of August you should check any Learner's you have entered earlier to make sure there are no issues. For more details of cross year ILR working in PICS please refer to ILR Year-end in PICS.

Changes to ILR Data Capture

Recording Work Placements

Work experience aims are changing: instead of multiple aims representing the number of hours being worked, there’ll now be one aim, ZWRKX001 (see Appendix H of the ILR specification for further details), and a separate field to capture of hours (available from the 18th July). All learners who require a work experience aim, and have a start date of 1st August onwards, need to have this aim on their record, so add it to your base data now.

End Point Assessments

New ILR Field: EPA Organisation ID: In PICS you will be able to link an organization to a learner as their End Point Assessment (EPA) Organisation as of PICS 15.10.  This organisation will have an EPA ID that can be set in CRM from 18th July. We would advise you to start adding EPAs to Organisations now, giving them a Role Type of N: EPA Organisation, and completing the EPA Organisation ID using the codes available from the register.

Learning Delivery Aim Outcome

Outcome Codes 6 (Achieved but uncashed - AS levels Only) and 7 (Achieved and cashed - AS levels only) have been removed from the 17/18 ILR specification. The 17/18 ILR Exporter will export these values as 1 (Achieved) where necessary. You should leave the data in PICS as originally entered.

Apprenticeship Contract Type - End Date

The Apprenticeship Contract Type (ACT) End Date should only be completed if the Learning Actual End is recorded. There will be a slight change in the validation in PICS for 17/18 to allow 1 blank end date across all ACT records for an episode of learning.

Database Cleanups in 15.10 upgrade

• We have taken this time to prune export history for 2011 through to 2014.
• We are also removing legacy tables, pcQualLad and pcQualSS from the database.

ILR PDFs for Printing

The "Print ILR" feature in PICS will include the 2017 format PDFs when version 15.10 is released. Before then, you can download blank PDF templates to print yourself from our web site.

Blog posts

All blog posts relating to the 2017/18 transition can be accessed via the blog category 2017/18 Changes