To local authority and academy school workforce census contacts
Department for Education
Tel: 0370 000 2288
www.education.gov.uk/help/contactus
Date: 2 November 2015
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School workforce census 2015: Bulletin 2
The purpose of this note is to provide school workforce census (SWF) contacts in both local authorities and academies with important information in readiness for the 2015 collection. It provides some basic information about the SWF including arrangements around COLLECT familiarisation, scheduling arrangements, and also details of where further guidance can be found.
The school workforce census is statutory. All publically funded schools must complete a return. This includes local authority maintained schools, academies, free schools, studio schools, university technical colleges (UTCs) and pupil referral units (PRUs). Local authorities must make a return for the school staff that they employ centrally.
The collection:
• opens on Thursday 5th November 2015 and
• closes on Friday 4th December 2015.
You are strongly encouraged to make your return as soon as possible after the opening of the collection to allow time for data cleaning. All returns must be approved by 4th December.
You can find more information, including instructions for schools, academies and local authorities to complete the school workforce census 2015 on our website.
How to make a return
You should submit your data using COLLECT, our centralised data collection and management system. COLLECT guides are available to help you use the system to complete and submit your return.
You should contact your Secure Access approver(s), if you need a username and password to submit data for the SWF 2015 collection.
User names and passwords for COLLECT are managed by the Secure Access system. Your school or local authority has a delegated approver(s) who can allocate you access to departmental systems that use Secure Access.
More information is available on the Secure Access help screen.
You can also get help using the Secure Access service request form.
All users will have access to the live site from 8:30am on 5 November 2015. We will not be staging access to the COLLECT for this data collection.
Changes from 2014
The most significant changes from last year’s collection are related to teacher’s pay. Details are available in the collection guide. These changes are particularly important to allow the Department to accurately monitor and understand how the new teachers’ pay arrangements are being implemented and their impact.
Please note that in the data item ‘Date of the last pay review’ the date required is the date of the pay determination. If the 2015 pay determinations were agreed on 15 October 2015 backdated to the 1 September 2015 and put into payment on 30 October then the 15 October 2015 should be recorded. If the 2015 pay determination has not yet been recorded and the 2014 pay determination salaries are to be reported in the 2015 School Workforce Census then that date should be recorded in the field.
Please note that some management information systems will automatically populate Leadership Pay Framework according to the start date of the contract. This may need manually updating where it is incorrect.
Data Protection and Security
Data kept on school staff (in any medium, including within an MIS) are personal data. The data must be managed in accordance with the requirements of the Data Protection Act 1998. All staff with access to personal data must be aware of their responsibilities under the Act.
Schools and local authorities are asked to make all staff they employ (and for whom data will be submitted in the school workforce census) aware of Privacy Notices. Privacy Notices inform staff of the purposes for which their personal data may be held and used by the school, local authority, the department and other organisations. Local authorities will also need to bring the Privacy Notices to the attention of staff employed in Voluntary Aided and Foundation Schools. Academies will need to issue or make available Privacy Notices to their staff. The department’s website contains suggested text for a Privacy Notice and suggested information for local authorities/schools to include locally or on their respective websites is also given.
Once a Privacy Notice has been issued to a member of staff a further one only needs to be issued if there are changes to the data collected, the uses to which the data will be put or the organisations it will be shared with.
Important notes on data completion.
A correct DfE teacher reference number, (TRN), must be provided for every teacher. For teachers that have recently started in your employment the TRN can be obtained in 3 ways:
• by checking with the NCTL register of qualified teachers
• notifying Capita teachers pensions of the appointment
• teachers’ may have their own record of the number that they can provide such as their award of qualified teacher status or teachers pensions benefits statement.
Please note that schools direct trainees (salaried) are within the scope of the school workforce census and must be included in schools’ returns where they are in service.
It is a statutory requirement under section 67 of the Children and Families Act 2014 for every mainstream school and maintained nursery to have a designated special educational needs coordinator, (SENCO) who is a qualified teacher working in the school. Please identify the designated SEN-Coordinator for each school in the role field in the school workforce census return. More than one role can be attached to each staff member’s contract information as appropriate.
The base pay provided for part-time staff must be the actual annual salary in payment and not the full-time equivalent salary upon which the actual salary is based.
Please do not report individual staff contracts in the school workforce census showing zero hours worked per week. This could include any staff employed on flexible ‘zero hours’ arrangements where the hours worked cannot be determined or teachers listed in a local authority supply pool. Where this applies to a teacher and they are in school on the day of the census they should be included in the occasional teacher count.
Data quality reports in COLLECT
Two new reports are available within COLLECT; the Credibility Check Report (LA and school versions available) and the Multiple Contracts Report. These will help you identity issues with your return and help you submit data that correctly shows the staffing position within schools. You are strongly encouraged to run these reports and investigate any issues found after any error correction is done and before submission.
In addition, we have produced two documents that provide further detail of the reports available on COLLECT for users with the role of Source or Agent. These will shortly be made available on the same web page as the COLLECT guides.
Minimum required notes and auto Ok-able queries.
This year in COLLECT notes can only be provided at the return level. In addition for providers undertaking matching and reconciliation an indication of the position in the processing queue has also been added.
In order that queries can be quickly cleared where there are valid reasons for them a list of acceptable notes is available. Please make sure that any queries raised are fully checked and information amended where appropriate.
There are no auto OK-able queries in the School Workforce Census this year. Queries will be cleared by the helpdesk when an acceptable note is present,
XML generator tools
The XML generator tools are available on request from our helpdesk.
Please do not use the current version (v1.0) to provide your SWF return if you are not providing the pay range information. Our developers are working on an update to the generator and we aim to issue a new version by the end of this week (6 November).
Please note that there are two generators available which convert data into the required xml format: one for school employed staff and one for centrally employed staff. The zipped files for each tool includes an excel template. Only those local authorities and academies with non-standard HR/payroll systems or school MIS unable to provide data in the correct format for submission to COLLECT will need to use these tools.
Background
The census is the department’s sole source of school workforce data.
School workforce data and statistics are a key part of the department’s evidence base for policy making. Releasing data at national and local level is a key part of our publication strategy that supports the government’s wider transparency agenda. The SWF is used to provide the workforce information provided in the school performance tables.
The data collected used for the monitoring of school workforce volumes and characteristics which are vital in helping inform departmental policy around the recruitment and retention of teachers; for example informing decisions around spending on ITT and Bursaries. The data is also used to provide analysis that informs the School Teachers’ Review Body deliberations on teachers’ pay and to negotiate with the Treasury over spending review decisions.
The data enables comparison of practice and deployment of workforce across schools – and is made available through the extended performance tables to help people do so. In addition, we utilise the information to make comparisons with other international systems.
The department also makes elements of the data available to other government departments and the research community to help facilitate wider analysis to inform evidence based policy and practice in education.
The annual school workforce statistics are published each year in July and cover a broad range of school workforce information.
General issues
If you have any COLLECT or SWF queries of a general nature, please contact us by using the service request form
Kind regards
Education Data Division
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