Purpose
To provide a technical specification and file format of the FE Workforce staff record to enable the intended audience to be able to meet the requirements for FE Workforce staff data return for the 2024/2025 academic year
Intended Audience
This is a technical document aimed at those responsible for:
• making staff data returns
• data specification implementation
• MI system design (including MI managers, commercial software suppliers and own software writers)
This specification is produced to assist providers in collecting and submitting staff data in an XML file for the 2024/2025 FE Workforce Data Collection.
Note: as part of the 2024/2025 FE Workforce Data Collection, providers will also expect to submit organisation level data relating to vacancies and recruitment. This data is not included in this specification and will only be available to be submitted via an online form via the Submit Learner Data Service. Data definitions for the vacancy and recruitment data will be provided in a separate document.
The terms ‘we’, ‘our’, ‘us’ and ‘Department of Education (DfE)’ all refer to the Department of Education.
When we use the term ‘you’ or ‘providers’ to mean colleges, training organisations and local authorities who receive funding from the DfE or through a loans facility or contract for apprenticeships, to deliver education and training.
When we refer to ‘the collection’ (unless otherwise specified), this refers to the staff data collection.
The FE and skills sector in England will use the FE Workforce Data Collection to collect data about staff and recruitment in the sector. This will bring our knowledge of the workforce in FE on a par with that of schools and higher education. The workforce collection will include demographic and personal characteristics, such as ethnicity and disability data, which will enable us to plan better and understand the impact of our policies on diversity in FE staffing and leadership.
It will support the delivery of technical education reforms crucial to individual and national prosperity and be used to plan, implement, and evaluate FE workforce policy.
In addition, it will provide the ability to assess and analyse the capacity of the FE workforce and generate valuable outputs for providers for planning, analysis, bench marking and skills gaps.
‘Not known’ answer options are available for some questions within the collection. This should only be utilised where a provider is unable to collect the data, e.g., the member of staff left during the academic year that the data is being collected for. The use of ‘not known’ answers by providers will be monitored and would only be expected to be used in a minority of cases.
The ‘not known’ options have been split into two distinct categories:
Not known – Employee chose not to disclose.
Not known – Unable to find the answer (e.g the staff member has left the organisation)
Providers should complete a return if they accessed any of the funding streams specified below during the 2024/2025 academic year (1 Aug 2024-31 July 2025) and do not return the Schools Workforce census or the HESA staff record.
• Apprenticeships (including carry-in, procured, non-levy and levy funded)
• 16 to 19 study programme
• Skills bootcamps (including devolved/delegated contracts)
• Devolved/delegated adult education budget
• Community Learning
• Tailored Learning
• Adult Skills Fund
This will include:
• FE Colleges
• Sixth Form Colleges
• Special Post-16 Institutions
• Local Authorities
• Independent Training Providers
Third Sector and Voluntary organisations.
• 16-19 Academy Convertors
• 16-19 Free Schools
The following providers are not in scope for the collection:
Employer providers - an employer that pays the apprenticeship levy and is listed on APAR as either an employer provider or main provider
Schools and academies (including multi-academy trusts) whose staff are included in the Schools Workforce Census
HE institutions who return the HESA staff record
You should complete a staff record for an individual if they had one or more contracts of employment with you, the provider, during the 2024/2025 academic year (1 Aug - 31 July).
You do not need complete a staff record for an individual for the following types of staff:
Agency staff
Self-employed or freelance staff
Staff working for a provider through an intermediary, such as a personal service company
You do not need to complete a staff record for an individual in a support role that is not directly supporting learning, e.g., catering, maintenance, or other such service support roles.
Include staff members who contribute to or support both non DfE and DfE funded education or training, even if the staff member spends most of their time providing education or training that is a non DfE funded provision.
You do not have to include any staff solely providing education or training that isn’t funded through one of the funding models.
You should tell us about the following types of staff that are employed by or to work for the organisation. Staff role job titles or job position names vary between providers.
The following job roles listed are the full set of roles that are available to be used for the collection. Where provider’s job roles do not match these exactly, your judgement should be used to select the closest available option.
A senior leader is regarded as a staff member who has senior management
responsibility. This can include formal governance and director
responsibilities. They can be responsible for direction and vision or driving
strategic intent.
Job role / title can be known as:
• Assistant Head
• Assistant Principal
• CEO
• Director
• Executive Head Teacher
• Managing Director
• Principal/Head Teacher
• Senior Manager
• Vice-Principal
Manager is used here as a generic job role term. Providers may use different job titles such as Curriculum Lead, Faculty Lead, Functional Manager, Head of Department, Programme Lead, Quality Assurance Manager.
A teacher is member of staff who has a teaching role even if this is not their main role. Additional data is collected for staff members that have teaching responsibilities.
Teacher is being used as a generic job role term. Providers may use different job titles for teaching roles for example, Advanced Practitioner, Instructor, Lecturer, Practitioner, Teacher, Trainer, Tutor.
A member of support staff in any function across the organisation.
Job role / title can also be known as:
• Assessor
• Behaviour Specialist
• Bilingual Support Assistant
• Careers Advisor
• Counsellor
• Cover Supervisor
• Education Welfare Officer
• Higher Level Teaching Assistant
• Language Support
• Learning Facilitator
• Learning Mentor
• Learning Support
• Learning Support Assistant (SEN)
• Librarian
• Pastoral Support
• SEN Co-ordinator
• Sport Coach
• Teaching Assistant/Support
• Technician
• Therapist
Those that support the delivery of the FE provision in an administrative capacity such as Administrator, Admissions, Apprenticeships Administrator, Bursar, Business Manager, Clerk, Communication Support, Data Analyst, DSL and Safe Guarding Officer, Employer Engagement, Examinations Administrator, External Grants and Funding, Finance Officer, Human Resources (HR), ICT Network Manager, Information Services (MIS), Legal, Marketing Administrator, Office Manager, Payroll Administrator, Programme Recruitment, Receptionist, Secretary, Technology Support.
This specification details the structure and individual field requirements for the FE Workforce Staff Record.
The FE Workforce Staff Record is based on a data model which defines the entities covered by the FE Workforce Data Collection and the relationship between these entities and is shown in the figure below:
Image: FE Workforce Staff Record Entity Relationship Diagram
StaffData - You should return only one record for each member of staff in scope of the collection. The data recorded in the StaffData for all staff members entity contains basic information specific to the staff member such as their name, date of birth, gender and ethnicity. In line with GDPR regulations, several personal items have a ‘Prefer not to say’ option should that member of staff not wish to disclose that data.
See the individual field pages for details of when data is required:
JobRole – this entity collects the role/s and sub role/s that a member of staff undertakes within an organisation, one or more roles and sub roles may be collected for a member of staff. If a member of staff has teaching role, then additional data needs to be collected relating to the teaching role.
TeacherData – this entity is required for a member of staff who has a teaching role even if this is not their main role and contains information about teaching such as subject taught, experience and teaching qualifications. If the member of staff does not have a teaching role, then this data is not collected.
This data regarding a member of staff is only required for the period that they are working within FE. For Example, in the circumstance that a provider offers both further education and other levels of education. If a teacher only started working within FE on the 15th of July 2022, but has worked for the company since the 20th of May 2019. Then the former date should be given as the employees start date for employment.
ParticipatedInDfEProgrammes – this entity contains information about the DfE Programmes that a member of staff has benefitted from, directly or indirectly, during the academic year that the collection is for.
MainContract – this entity is required for every member of staff in the collection. It contains information on the main contract for the staff member such as annual salary / hourly rate and weekly hours.
FE Workforce Staff files must be given a 36-character filename followed by the XML file extension. The filename format is as follows and is not case sensitive:
FEW-LLLLLLLL-YYYY-yyyymmdd-hhmmss-NN.XML where:
FEW
LLLLLLLL is the UK provider reference number (UKPRN)
YYYY the academic year of the collection (for example 2024 to 2025 would be 2425)
yyyymmdd-hhmmss Date/time stamp from provider MIS on file generation
NN The serial number of the file, this can always be defaulted to 01
Each element is separated by hyphens.
Each file must have a header record structured as follows:
<Header>
<CollectionDetails>
<Collection>
<Year>
<FilePreparationDate>
</CollectionDetails>
<Source>
<ProtectiveMarking>
<UKPRN>
<SoftwareSupplier>
<SoftwarePackage>
<Release> <SerialNo>
<DateTime>
</Source>
</Header>
| Data | Description | Length | Data type | Mandatory field |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| <Collection> | FEW | 3 | RestrictedString | Y |
| <Year> | Year of collection | 4 | RestrictedString | Y |
| <FilePreparationDate> | Date of preparation of the file in yyyy-mm-dd format | 10 | xs:date | Y |
| <ProtectiveMarking > | OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE-Personal | 30 | RestrictedString | Y |
| <UKPRN> | The UK provider reference number for the provider | 8 | xs:int | Y |
| <SoftwareSupplier> | Name of the provider’s software supplier. Providers who write their own software for producing FEW files should use ‘Own Software’ | 40 | RestrictedString | N |
| <SoftwarePackage> | The name of the software product used to generate the FEW file | 30 | RestrictedString | N |
| <Release> | The version number of the software product used to generate the FEW file | 20 | RestrictedString | N |
| <SerialNo> | The serial number of the file. The serial number element of the header can be used (if required) to uniquely identify more than one FEW file | 2 | RestrictedString | Y |
| <DateTime> | Date/time stamp from provider MIS on file generation in yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss format | 10 | xs:dateTime | Y |
The required data type for each field is detailed on the field specification. All code lists are numeric fields and should be returned without leading zeros. The schema defines the different data types and rules that these must meet.
The different data types that are used within the FE Workforce Staff Record Specification are listed in the table below:
Dates are formatted according to W3C and UK government schema standards (YYYY-MM-DD). Details of standard XML schema data types (date, decimal, int, long, string) are found within the W3C schema standards.
Where data is not collected or is not required, the XML element must not be returned. Empty tags such as or must not be included.
| Data type | Description |
|---|---|
| xs:int | A signed 32-bit number |
| xs:long | A signed 64-bit number |
| xs:string | A string; typically Unicode |
| xs:decimal | A decimal number that includes a fractional part but is not specified using an exponent; for example, 123.45 |
| xs:dateTime, xs:date | Date and time related types |
| RestrictedString | Any of the following characters A-Z, a-z, 0-9, Space, Full stop, Comma, Semi-colon, Colon, ~!”@#$%&’()\/*+-<=>?_[]^£€ |
Technical requirements for submitting valid data