Learning support is claimed but the evidence chain is incomplete
This is wrong and needs correcting. It is not a judgement call.
In plain English
A learning support claim has been made, but one of the links in the chain is missing: the assessment of need, the record of support actually delivered, the cost of delivering it, or the recording that triggers the claim.
Why it matters
Learning support is a consistent audit focus precisely because the chain is easy to break. A claim with a gap anywhere in it is not defensible, however genuine the support was.
Funding
Unevidenced support claims are recoverable, and support claims are often material in value.
Performance
None directly, although learners without the support they need are less likely to achieve.
Audit
A consistent focus of funding audit across every stream, tested end to end from assessment through to claim.
Most likely causes
Ranked, because in practice a few causes explain most cases.
- commonThe support was delivered but not recorded against the learnerSupport delivered informally by teaching staff is real and often invisible in the records that an audit will examine.
- commonThere is no documented assessment of needThe need may be obvious to everyone who works with the learner and still be unevidenced.
- occasionalThere are no cost records behind the claimWhere a claim is expected to reflect actual cost, an absence of cost records undermines it even if the support is fully documented.
- occasionalThe monitoring codes were set without the underlying support being in placeApplying the code as a default for a group of learners, rather than per learner from assessed need, is a systematic error.
Check these first
- Check whether a documented assessment of need exists and is dated before the support began.
- Check whether there is a record of the support actually delivered.
- Check whether cost records exist, where the stream expects the claim to reflect cost.
- Check whether the monitoring records match what the other evidence shows.
Learning support monitoring recordsLearner funding and monitoring records
How to investigate
- Test the chain link by link rather than looking at the claim as a whole.
- Check whether the same gap appears across a group, which indicates a process failure rather than an individual omission.
- Where support is delivered informally, find out how it is recorded at all: usually the answer is that it is not.
- Involve the people delivering the support. They usually know what happened and have never been asked to record it.
In your system
These steps are system-neutral: they describe what has to be true in the data, which is the same whatever software your college runs. We do not publish supplier screen paths we have not verified, because menu locations differ by version and by local configuration, and a confidently wrong instruction is worse than none.
System-neutral
- Pull the learner's support file and the ILR record together.
- Confirm each link exists: assessment, delivery, cost, and the recording that triggers the claim.
- Where a link is missing but the support genuinely happened, document what can be documented now and record why it is retrospective.
- Where the support did not happen as claimed, remove the claim.
Building your own map of where each of these lives in your system is the most useful induction document an MIS team can have. How to build one.
How to fix it
- Complete whatever can legitimately be completed now, clearly marked as recorded retrospectively.
- Remove claims where the support cannot be substantiated.
- Fix the process so the next cohort is evidenced as it goes rather than reconstructed.
Stop this happening again
Fixing the record clears this case. A control is what stops the next one, so each of these names what to do, who owns it and how often.
A support plan created at the point of assessment, with delivery recorded against it as it happens.
A termly reconciliation between learners with support monitoring recorded and learners with a support plan on file.
Cost records maintained alongside delivery records where the stream expects the claim to reflect cost.
The rules behind this
Learning support funding requires a documented chain: an assessed need, the support actually provided, the cost of providing it, and the claim made. A claim without the chain is not defensible.
Evidence is strongest when it is created at the time of the event it describes and is retrievable without reconstruction. Evidence assembled after a query is asked is weaker and takes longer to produce.
Sources
These are the official documents this page rests on. Where a figure, a deadline or an exact rule matters, the document is the authority and this page is the explanation.
Content reused from GOV.UK is Crown copyright, used under the Open Government Licence. FEFunding is not endorsed by the Department for Education.