Further education data staff have spoken out about the stress and extra work caused by continued problems with Skills Funding Agency (SFA) software.

Management information system (MIS) officers responding to an FE Week survey hit out at the SFA over the strain and financial burden of preparing the fourth month funding data return (known as R04).

The survey was posted on the information authority Feconnect forum and the CMIS-Network, a Jiscmail email discussion group, on Wednesday, December 4 — the day before the R04 deadline.

Less than 10 per cent of the 153 respondents (9.2 per cent) believed they had a reliable funding report from the new funding information system (Fis) and almost a quarter (23.5 per cent) said they had been unable to successfully install the latest version.

The SFA came under fire last month after delays in releasing Fis, and the learning aims reference system (Lars) — an online tool enabling providers to look up qualification funding values — has still not been released in full, although a “Lars lite” version is available.

In response to the question “Is there anything you would like to say to the SFA about the impact on your organisation?”, a third of the 106 who answered mentioned the additional stress and workload.

The deputy college information systems manager of a large FE college said the process had caused “stress and worry in unnecessary amounts as a result of the software fiasco” and branded it “an appalling waste of time and money”.

The MIS manager of a local authority said: “The amount of staff hours spent on the Fis and invalid records is causing us financial problems.”

Another respondent, the deputy director for finance and funding at a large FE college, said: “We have exhausted staff, unreliable data and have had little or no support from the SFA, IA [Information Authority] or DS [Data Service].”

Concern over lack of support was also expressed by the MI manager of a small FE college, who said: “I have had emails into the Data Service for over two weeks and they have just replied this morning with answers that are completely irrelevant to the question.”

Many data staff also called on the SFA to take responsibility for the situation, which was dubbed a “shambles”.

The director of MIS at a large FE college said: “Every apology is limited (‘we apologise to anyone who might have been affected’) with spin saying actually it is not that bad after all — it is that bad.”

The director of a small independent training provider said: “If a provider had delivered performance at this level they would have lost their contract … Parity with sanctions please — if providers are penalised for poor performance, I suggest the same must be true for the SFA.”

The R04 will be used to calculate the statistical first release, due out in January, but the SFA was unavailable for comment as to whether large amounts of inaccurate or incomplete data would prevent publication.

When asked by FE Week about the stress caused by R04, Association of Colleges (AoC) assistant chief executive Julian Gravatt said: “We’re confident that colleges will manage stress issues among their staff and there’s AoC advice available to help them.

“Hopefully this week’s R04 return will be a success and we’ll both build on this next year while ensuring that everyone learns the right lessons from the project.”

See Ian Pryce’s expert piece

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2 Comments

  1. John Littler

    Thank goodness Julian is around to offer comfort when we are stressed, and to offer us hope that lessons might be learned, even though they have not been learnt from past errors (remember the chaotic change from LAD to LARA before LARS was conceived?). The funding methodology has changed at the same time to compound the difficulties of new software systems. One big problem is that MIS staff rely on accurate FIS funding reports to check if the ILR is correctly coded. Since the funding reports are not trustworthy, we have no assurance that what we have submitted is correct however well we have studied the 165 page ILR manual and the new 100 page SFA simplified funding manual (not forgetting new EFA rules too).

  2. Caroline Miller

    Despite the figure quoted that less than 10% of respondents believe that they have a reliable funding report the Skills Funding Agency has decided to actually implement performance management on contracts and is now reducing funds to providers. Last week we were given less than 4 hours to argue our case for our 16-18 apprenticeship funding not to be reduced and despite providing the information the SfA has, in its infinite wisdom, not only decided to claw back funding on the first quarter but also to extrapolate this to a full year! If this was to happen to our Adult Skills Budget we would be in serious difficulties. There must be many providers who will now be in serious financial difficulties as a consequence. I can see legal challenges coming!