Audio lesson · 8 minutes
The data quality routine
A small number of checks, run every month without exception, prevent the majority of funding, performance and audit problems in further education.
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Chapters
- The monthly set
- The termly set
- The annual set
Transcript
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Introduction
The data quality routine that prevents most problems. A small number of checks, run every month without exception, prevent the majority of funding, performance and audit problems in further education.
The monthly set
The value is in doing the same five every month and tracking the count for each. A count that rises is a control failure, not a workload problem, and it tells you where to look. Each of these checks covers something validation cannot see, which is why they matter more than the validation report.
The termly set
These are the checks that find the audit findings before the auditor does. They are sampling exercises rather than exhaustive ones, and a failure in a sample is a process finding rather than a record finding. Report them as a percentage with a named cause, not as a list of learners to fix.
The annual set
Each of these has a deadline built into it. Done late, none of them is useful: the specification review after the first return, the hours reconciliation after December, or the results reconciliation after the close all arrive too late to change anything.
Read it instead
The data quality routine that prevents most problemsThe written module carries the same content at three depths, with the worked examples, the pitfalls and the sources.
Sources
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