Scenario
The first return of a new funding year fails badly
The first validation run of the new funding year produces hundreds of failures. What is the fastest route to a clean file?
The situation
- Timing
- First collection window of a new funding year
- Volume
- Several hundred validation failures
- Previous year
- Returns were clean throughout
Constructed for teaching. No scenario in the Academy contains real learner data, and none ever will.
Where do you start?
The rules behind this
An ILR file is validated against the published validation rules for the funding year. Records that fail a validation rule are rejected or excluded from funding until the underlying data is corrected.
A funding rule is only ever true for a stated funding year. Carrying an answer from one year into another, without checking, is one of the most common causes of an incorrect claim.
Corrections should be made in the source system that owns the data, then regenerated into the ILR. Editing an ILR file directly leaves the source system wrong and the error returns at the next generation.
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.
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