Audio lesson · 8 minutes
The learning support evidence chain
Need assessed, support delivered, cost recorded, claim made. Every link has to hold, and a gap anywhere makes the claim indefensible however genuine the support was.
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Chapters
- Four links
- The mechanism differs by stream
Transcript
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Introduction
Learning support: the evidence chain from need to claim. Need assessed, support delivered, cost recorded, claim made. Every link has to hold, and a gap anywhere makes the claim indefensible however genuine the support was.
Four links, all of which have to hold
Audit tests the chain end to end and a gap anywhere breaks it. The most common gap is the second link: support delivered informally by teaching staff, genuinely and consistently, with no record that it happened. The second most common is the first: a need that is obvious to everyone who works with the learner and has never been written down.
The mechanism differs by stream
The underlying principle is constant: need, provision, cost, claim, evidence. What differs is how the claim is made, what it is worth and what the rules require you to hold. High needs funding is a separate arrangement again, built from place funding and a local authority top-up, and should not be confused with learning support within a programme.
Making the chain hold in practice
The most effective single change is to make the support plan the thing that triggers the claim, rather than the monitoring code. If no plan exists, no code is applied, and the chain cannot break at the first link. The second is to give teaching staff a route to record support that takes seconds rather than minutes. Informal support is real and valuable, and it goes unrecorded because recording it is inconvenient rather than because anybody is careless. The third is a termly reconciliation in both directions: learners with codes but no plan, and learners with plans but no codes. The second list is often larger than the first, and it represents support the college is delivering and not claiming. Where a claim genuinely cannot be substantiated, remove it and record the decision. A removed claim with a documented reason is a far better position than a claim that fails at audit.
Read it instead
Learning support: the evidence chain from need to claimThe written module carries the same content at three depths, with the worked examples, the pitfalls and the sources.
Sources
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