Winter 2024 Update

As per the last Legal Review, the HEAT Privacy Notice has been updated to apply to all individuals. This is now being operationalised, with this first step being to implement an Ambassador Retention Tool.

Going forward, the permanent deletion of any Ambassador records that will appear in the Retention Tool will be managed alongside Student records. This new Retention Tool will work in the same way as the Student Retention Tool, other than the system will additionally look at Ambassadors with a Work Opportunity status of ‘Accepted’. This status will be the marker as attendance of an Activity, and is part of the logic to how Ambassadors are included in the tool.

To support this work, a new permission ‘View Ambassador Retention’ has been introduced to the following default HEAT Roles:

• Lead

• Lead Lite

• Coordinator

• Coordinator Lite

• User with Reports

• User

This work has upgraded the Work Opportunity, Timesheet, Expense, and Contract tables within the Ambassador Portal. The scrolling of these tables for navigational purposes is replaced by a “stacking” design, to improve the usability of the Portal when browsing on a mobile device.

To support this change, we have also added the ‘Choose Columns’ option to these tables within the Ambassador Portal.

We would like to thank the Kent & Medway Progression Federation (KMPF) and Kent and Medway Collaborative Outreach Programme (KaMCOP) for funding this development item and improving our shared system.

Following our Data Update notifying members about the upcoming deprecation and replacement of the Institution ‘Type’ and Sub-Type’ fields, we are delighted to announce that the new ‘Type Of Establishment’ and ‘Establishment Type Group’ fields are now active on the database and in the relevant exports where the deprecated fields were featured.

This update will primarily impact English and Welsh institutions as they are updated via Get Information About Schools record, and will ensure that our Institution data fields align with the Department for Education (DfE) as far as possible. Moreover, this update to the logic will future-proof the content of these fields and keep them reflective of the DfE’s data values.

The summary of changes are as follows:

• Archival of the Institution ‘Type’ and ‘Sub-Type’ fields
• Creation of the new ‘Establishment Type Group’ and ‘Type Of Establishment’ fields

How will this change impact the database and the Institution record?

Though the new fields will replace and archive the Institution ‘Type’ and Sub-Type’ fields, they will still provide members with the same key context to support their institution profiling.

As both the ‘Type’ and ‘Sub-Type’ fields are filters in the Institution record search bar, this update will therefore impact the filter conditions that members can apply. Following this change, the new ‘Establishment Type Group’ and ‘Type Of Establishment’ fields will still be available to use as filters in the Institution record search bar, but will be based on and allow you to filter using the DfE current values.

As an example, following this update The Aldgate School #00000002 (member’s only) new ‘Type Of Establishment’ field value will be “Voluntary aided school”, and the new ‘Establishment Type Group’ field value will be “Local authority maintained schools”.

Will this impact the precision of Institution filtering?

Though this change to the most up to date values will change the filter list from the previously available options, such as ‘State’, ‘State Other’, and ‘State Special’, members will still be able to filter down institutions precisely through combination of the ‘Type Of Establishment’ and ‘Establishment Type Group’ filters. For example, should members wish to filter down the Institution list to just ‘Local authority maintained schools’ which are also ‘Special Schools’, for example, this can be achieved through combination of the two aforementioned filters.

For more information about this change, please see our Data Update.

This work improved the format of the Institution Profile Report underlying dataset (member’s only), to make this output easier to use when filtering down data points.

The summary of changes are as follows:

• The ‘Attainment Dataset Year’ and the ‘Destinations Dataset Year’ fields have been separated from their previous combined format, to ensure members have more control over the data they can filter down to and that they wish to see within the larger dataset.
• The supplementary Deciles .csv which forms part of the Institution Profile Report zipped folder has been archived, as this has been superseded by the underlying dataset, wherein the same deciles data can be accessed. We announced the archival of the Deciles .csv earlier this year, and the release of the Winter 2024 Update will see this work complete.

For the latest information on this change to the Institution Profile Report files, please see our Data Update.

Following on from the major change introduced in the Summer 2024 Update, we now offer the opportunity to collect ‘Total Staff’ and ‘Total Parent/Carer’ counts on each Institution added as a Beneficiary to the Activity record, to improve reporting and data accuracy.

To support this work, the Activity export (members only) will now include a ‘Total Parent/Carer’ and ‘Total Staff’ count per Activity.

This update introduced the functionality for the HEAT Service to add custom entries to the Linked Institutions table on the About tab of an Institution record (members only). This will allow us to clearly denote the relationships between Institutions on the system beyond the Department for Education (DfE) relationships.

In the first instance, this new functionality will be used to denote the following relationships:

• Campus Institutions and their Campus Parent: This information will support with navigation of the Further Education (FE) Institutions on the database
• Shared Sixth Form Institutions and their base institutions: This information will support navigation of Institutions with shared sixth forms with other Institutions
• Trust Parent and their linked Institutions: This information will support navigation of the Trust institutions on the HEAT database

We have improved information consistency when creating a Work Opportunity (members only) via the Activity record or by the left hand menu. When a Work Opportunity is created by the left hand menu, the value entered into the ‘Organiser’ field now pulls through from the associated Activity record as expected.

Additionally, when the Activity has it’s ‘Start’ and ‘End Date’ changed from an original value stored, the new date is now displayed when adding a Work Opportunity from the left-hand menu.

A further improvement is the addition of two new columns to the Work Opportunity export, ‘Ambassadors Current Status’ and ‘Ambassador Application Last Updated’, to help manage and sort information with ease.

We have fixed an issue which occurred within Reports (members only) when the Activity ‘Academic Year Start Date’ spanned more than one academic year. This resulted in records being omitted from the selected report, and this issue has now been fixed. To avoid double counting, an Activity record will be included on any report where the ‘Academic Year Start Date’ resides in.

We have also made improvements to how Users can generate reports of shared information. This is now based upon the organisation that the User belongs to, instead of the Institution Group from which they are generating the report.

We have continued to work on moving cognitive searches, feeding into the JISC recommendation of a transition to Microsoft Azure Function Apps.