This page covers some of the more significant changes in PICS 20.00 for the 2020/21 ESFA Contract Year. This version will be released on 14th August 2020.
See Upgrading to the New Version of PICS
The ILR learner data has been rolled into the new year according to the ESFA migration specifications. This includes the normal population of annual and historic fields, and also these extra migrations specific to 2020:
FME code 1 has not been rolled forward.
LSR code 61 has not been rolled forward.
HE Type of Instance Year codes 3, 4 and 5 have been rolled into code 2.
PPE and HEM fields have been removed from the ILR, so they have not been rolled forward.
We are removing historic values from 2014 and before. Not only will this reduce database sizes and improve performance, it is also good GDPR practice. We have removed around 350 fields and several tables.
We have also removed the following values which are no longer required:
All A70 related fields
pcTECEpi - Learner fields from TEC records
pcBrCase - Brief Case Control table
OPPCheck - OPP Check-off records
uLSCUPC - LSC Postcode Uplift basedata
For those of you who use the PICS data directly or via SQL Server exports, here is a spreadsheet containing a full listing of all of the fields removed, so that you can ensure your reports are not referring to them before the upgrade takes place.
The 2020 ILR does not contain any major data capture changes. However, we have made the following minor changes:
A new Actual Off-the-Job field has been added to programme aims.
There has been a description change for LLDD 4.
PPE Learner FAM has been removed.
LSR 61 and FME 1 have been removed.
The Agreement ID field has been removed.
Employment Status Monitoring BSI code 5 has been added, while 2 and 3 are no longer valid.
There has been a description change for Withdrawal Reason code 48.
Learning Aim FAMs NSA, WPP, POD and HEM have all been removed.
The number of Learning Aim DAM fields has increased from 4 to 6.