Glossary of Acronyms

Adult Education Budget - This document sets out the details of the 2019 to 2020 ESFA funding system used to fund activity paid for from the adult education budget (AEB) and 16 to 18 traineeships.

Advanced Learner Loan 2021 - 2022 - The rules apply to all providers of education and training who hold a loans facility and loans bursary fund agreement with the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA). This agreement allows providers to receive loans payments from the Student Loans Company (SLC) on behalf of learners and loans bursary payments from ESFA.

Apprenticeship Provider and Assessment Register - From Tuesday 1 August 2023, the register of apprenticeship training providers (RoATP) is now called the apprenticeship provider and assessment register (APAR). The APAR can be dowloaded from here as a .csv file.

Department for Education- The Department for Education is responsible for children’s services and education, including early years, schools, higher and further education policy, apprenticeships and wider skills in England.

Earnings adjustment statements is an online process that is used to claim funding that cannot be reported in the ILR.

Equality and Diversity Impact Measures - Monitoring EDIMs essentially requires a two-stage process: data collection and analysis. The first step is to gather information on the diversity of an organisation's workforce, including potential recruits and existing employees. Diversity information is based on current UK equality legislation which aims to prevent discrimination on grounds of age, disability, gender, race, sexual orientation, religion and other protected characteristics. Effective monitoring delivers equality and diversity - ACAS.

End Point Assessment - Apprentices doing standards have their skills, knowledge and behaviours evaluated at the end of their apprenticeship by taking an end-point assessment.

End Pont Assessment Organisations - An independent organisation must be involved in the end-point assessment of each apprentice so that all apprentices following the same standard are assessed consistently.

European Social Fund has helped retrain and improve the skills of hundreds of thousands of people. Under the Withdrawal Agreement, the UK will continue to participate in programmes funded under the current 2014-2020 Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) until their closure.

Education and Skills Funding Agency - The ESFA brings together the former responsibilities of the Education Funding Agency (EFA) and Skills Funding Agency (SFA) to create a single agency accountable for funding education and skills for children, young people and adults.

ESFA communities - is new peer to peer discussion forum for further education and training providers and has replaced the outdated feconnect.

Feconnect - has been replaced by ESFA Communities since September 2020 and as such Feconnect will be switched off on 29th July 2021

Funding Information System - A desktop service application element of the Education and Skills Funding Agency’s data collections system which can be used by data providers to: validate Individualised Learner Record (ILR) data, calculate funding and derived variables, create a range of reports based on a set of ILR data.

Funding rules monitoring reports - The suite of FRM reports supports the current year's monitoring plan. As this work supports the ESFA's overall assurance approach, FRM reports are available in VYED and some also appear in the provider data self-assessment toolkit (PDSAT).

Identity Management Services system  - is the secure service accessed by training providers to administer all their ESFA procured training contracts.

Individualised Learner Record - Information about learner data that publicly funded colleges, training organisations, local authorities and employers (FE providers) must collect and return in any specific funding year. You should produce an XML file from your MI system and upload it to the ESFA via SLD.

Internal Quality Assurance - relates to the monitoring of all teaching, learning and assessment activities which learners undertake. The activities should form part of an organisation’s overall quality assurance system.

Independent Training Providers - also known as independent learning providers (ILP's) or Private Training Providers (PTP's) offer vocational courses and training to young people and adults. Unlike other further education institutions, independent training providers are not managed by the state, although a large part of their work is funded and controlled by government bodies such as the ESFA. Ofsted also conducts assessments and visits in the same way it does for the rest of the FE sector.

Learner Entry Tool - The ILR Learner Entry Tool is an application which enables users to create ILR data in XML file format manually using a data entry interface. This software is supplied to users who will submit ILR data to the Education & Skills Funding Agency but who do not have access to an MI system. This application does not support data sets that exceed 500 learner records.

Learning Records Service - the LRS organisation portal issues and holds ULN's. They are for people who use the numbers to index learner identity details as well as education and training qualifications within the PLR.

Management Information System - Refers to a computer-based system that provides managers with the tools to organise, evaluate and efficiently manage data within an organisation.

Management Information System - In this instance an MIS is used to store information about the learning aims and programmes being undertaken and if ILR Compliant, is used to generate the required ILR XML file and is directly exported from this.

Not in Education, Employment or Training - It refers to a person who is unemployed not in school or vocational training.

The Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills - inspect services providing education and skills for learners of all ages. We also inspect and regulate services that care for children and young people. Ofsted is a non-ministerial department.

Professional and Career Development Loans - Professional and Career Development Loans are bank loans that have to be paid back. You start repaying the loan (plus interest at a reduced rate) 1 month after leaving your course.

Professional and Career Development Loan Learning Provider - Any learning provider who wants to offer courses supported by a PCDL must apply to the ESFA when the appropriate window of opportunity is open.

Provider Data Self Assessment Toolkit - Imports ILR XML files and creates reports to help FE providers make accurate and complete ILR data

Personal learning record - A PLR is a permanent online record of a learner's qualifications and achievements. It records general and vocational qualifications such as A levels, GCSEs, BTEC, diplomas and functional skills.

Qualification Achievement Rates - Education and training qualification achievement rates and the associated pass rates and retention rates, are a measure of the quality of the education and training courses that a provider ran in a particular funding year. QAR's are used in the National Achievement Rate Tables to show apprentices and employers the relative quality of provision. Ofsted also use them as part of their inspection process.

Register of Apprenticeship Training Providers - The register of apprenticeship training providers is a list of organisations that are eligible to receive government funding to train apprentices. Check out the Cleverblogs posts under the RoATP tag.

Register of Apprenticeship Assessment Organisations - initial name for RoEAO. Only organisations on the register of end-point assessment organisations are eligible to conduct independent end-point assessment of apprentices.

Register of End-point Assessment Organisations - The sole purpose of the Register of End-point Assessment Organisations (the Register) is to provide employers with a list of organisations who have shown us that they are capable of delivering independent end-point assessment. The Register is not for the training elements of the apprenticeship.

Register of training organisations - Organisations that are eligible to be invited to tender for education and training services. The ESFA are formally decommissioning ROTO on the 31 July 2021, funding rules will be updated to reflect this.

Student Loans Company - is a non-profit making government-owned organisation that administers loans and grants to students in universities and colleges in the UK. The SLC is an executive non-departmental public body, sponsored by the Department for Education.

Submit learner data is the service training providers that receive funding directly from the Education and Skills Funding Agency use to submit; Individualised learner records (ILR), Earnings adjustment statements (EAS), ESF (European Social Fund) supplementary data, Funding Claims and Further Education (FE) staff and vacancy data.

Student Loans Portal - is a service for learning providers to manage their Advanced Learner Loan candidates, payments, attendance etc.

Unique Learner Number - Learners retain the same ULN for accessing their PLR throughout their lives whatever level of learning they attain and wherever they choose to undertake education, training and learning.

View your education data is a service designed for organisations working with the ESFA and provides analytical insights to support business intelligence and better decision making.

Extensible Mark-up Language - ILR data must be sent to the ESFA by uploading a file in XML format to ESFA’s secure online portal.