School Workforce Census Bulletin 2024

1. Application of the SIMS Autumn Release 2024.

2. The SIMS Summer Release 2024 plus import of Fileset 2803 or above.

Hosted schools are on the summer release and fileset 2805 which is suitable for running and authorising your workforce return

SBP (School Business Professional) and LNT (Leadership Non Teacher) are obtained from a member of staff’s contract, so why is SIMS providing tick boxes for SBP and LNT?

Professional panel of Professional Details tab of Focus | Person | Staff

Answer

The DfE required SBP and LNT regardless of whether contacts are being included in the census. Where a school is providing contract data, SBP and LNT can be obtained from staff contracts. However, where contracts are not being provided, another source is needed to obtain SBP and LNT. Hence the introduction tick boxes for SBP and LNT.

Tools | Statutory Returns Tools | School Workforce Census Settings

School’s that provide contract data are free to make use of the new SBP and LNT tick boxes, but this will make no difference to the census as SBP and LNT will continue to be obtained from staff contracts where schools have ticked to provide staff contract details.

DfE Known Issue

DfE Issue 1: Validation query 4565Q (Staff member appears to be paid more than the maximum of the local government pay scale, please supply a reason in a return level note)

The DfE validation specification for query 4565Q states that where (‘OSP’ or ‘TAS’ ‘) AND <ContractType> = ‘PRM’ or ‘FXT’ or ‘TMP’, then Base Pay, totalled across contract node should be less that £55,000. This has has changed from £50,000 in the previous year’s DfE specification.

However, the DfE coding of validation query 4565Q has not taken account of this change, so that this validation is incorrectly triggering for salary values between £50,000 and £55,000.

Solution

The DfE has corrected this mistake in their COLLECT validation but will not be correcting this mistake for their school validation.

Changes compared to School Workforce Census 2023

Dates

• Census reference date: Thursday the 7th of November (the first Thursday of November as usual).
• Absences: Collected for the 1st of September 2023 to the 31st of August 2024 (inclusive).
• Continuous contracts: Collected for the 1st of September 2023 to the 7th of November 2024 (inclusive).

Sex

• Sex to be reported as Sex rather than Gender.

SIMS detail report

• Improved criteria for the reports.

Newsfeed link

• Link added to the main newsfeed for SWC 2024, from where you can navigate to all other relevant newsfeeds.

DfE summary and validation report files

• The versions available on release will not be suitable for uploading the return file to the DfE.
• We have ensured that validation error 1 is triggered until suitable files are available from the DfE.

Communication box

• This reinforces the validation error 1 until suitable files are available from the DfE.

Contracts not stored in SIMS

• SBP (School Business Professional) tick box added to Personnel application.
• LNT (Leadership Not Teacher) tick box added to Personnel application.
• SBP tick box supported by reporting dictionary.
• LNT tick box supported by reporting dictionary.
• SBP tick box supported by the Person Data Output.
• LNT tick box supported by the Person Data Output.