What's new

Enhancement to Leave Auditing

We’ve made several improvements to the auditing functionality for approved leave requests, making it easier to track who actioned requests and when.

New feature

A new ‘Actioned By’ column has been added to the Absence > Holiday screen on an employee's profile, providing visibility of who approved each leave request, along with the date and time of the action.
On the leave details screen, there is now a dedicated button above the existing ‘Approved’ status. When selected, this button displays who approved the leave, along with the date and time of approval.
The employee audit log now includes the leave period for approved requests, making it clear which dates the approval relates to. Previously, only the approval action was visible without reference to the specific leave dates.

These changes aim to improve transparency and provide a clearer audit trail for leave management.

Streamlined Accrual Calculations and Enhanced UI Visibility

We've optimised the system's accrual calculation process to improve performance, user experience and provide clearer visibility on how these calculations are derived.

Enhanced User Interface

When selecting the calculator icon against an employee’s holiday balance or using the Show Advanced option, users will now see a more detailed breakdown of how the accrual calculations are determined. This enhanced view provides clearer insights and explanations for each calculation component.

Previous limitations

The prior user interface did not provide sufficient clarity on how holiday balances were calculated. This update addresses that limitation, offering a more comprehensive and transparent view for users to understand the calculation breakdown.

School Workforce Census

With this update, we've updated the School Workforce Census generation process with the latest statutory requirements to be in line with the School Workforce Census Technical Specification 2024 as set out by the DfE, along with some quality-of-life changes to make returning your SWF Census more manageable.

Statutory changes

There are no business or customer process changes to the SWF Census this year. As per the requirements outlined by the SWF Census guidance provided by the DfE. The only required change is to the XML generation and the elements used within. The Gender tag has been renamed to Sex to remove some uncertainty on the data that was expected to be returned.

Customer Impact

Same as the Gender field in previous years, the field used to populate the Sex tag within the SWF Census file is pulled from the Gender field within the employee’s profile, therefore, the Gender recorded against an employee's profile must be their legally recognised Sex.

We do provide a ‘Gender Preferred Term’ for any Employees who request to be identified as something different from what's recorded in their Gender field. The Gender Preferred Term field however isn't submitted to the DfE as it is not required or requested by them.

Generate Summary and Errors list

As part of the SWF Census, we now offer a couple of tools to enable you to check the data within the SWF Census file. This should provide peace of mind to customers returning their Census that the data within it is correct and up to date. This comes in the way of Error and Query lists, as well as Summary Reports.

Customer Impact

The Sex field within the SWF Census file is pulled from the Gender field within the employee's profile, therefore, the Gender recorded against an employee's profile must be their legally recognised Sex.

We provide a ‘Gender Preferred Term’ for any Employees who request to be identified as something different from what's recorded in their Gender field. This field however is not requested by the DfE and so is not returned as part of the SWF Census.

Negotiating Body Workflow Improvements

To improve the process of managing and uplifting your negotiating bodies, we've made some quality-of-life changes to how this is done. Though the process remains mostly the same, we have made it more responsive, more consistent, and made it behave in a more predictable way.

Changes to the Negotiating Body Uplift Screen

Previously, the Save button immediately saved the Negotiating Body without any prompt, this has been moved to the Save Negotiating Body popup, which appears afterward to allow for confirmation and is part of the process of what should be followed when it is saved.
There is now a Cancel button provided to undo any unintentional changes made to the Negotiating Body
If editing of the Negotiating Body is enabled, and then the ‘New’ button is used, changes are discarded to avoid any unintentional changes occurring.

Changes to the Save Negotiating Body popup formerly Push Out Changes

We've moved the ‘Save’ functionality away from the Negotiating Body screen and onto the Push Out Changes popup.
We've updated the ‘Push out changes’ popup to be clearer what it is doing by renaming it to ‘Save Negotiating Body’, as well as providing a new option for Make Changes to Negotiating Body without pushing out any changes.
We've made it clearer that there are options within the popup, previously the radio buttons could be mistaken for bullet points.
Made it clear that ‘Push Out Changes Now’ overrides the approval process.
We've removed any default options to avoid any unintentional processes being triggered, this must be a conscious decision made.
We've provided some small popup ‘toasts’ to indicate if the changes have been saved or discarded depending on the action taken.
We've ensured all popups are closed upon completion if a New Effective Date is being added, this is to remove any uncertainty as to whether the process was completed.
Closing the popup using the Close button or X now returns the user to the previous screen without any changes being saved.

Allow Pay Increment and Negotiating Body uplift for the same day

Along with the work made to the process of uplifting Negotiating Bodies, we have also made some work to improve the process when Pay Increments and Negotiating Body uplifts are made for the same Effective date, even though they may be processed at different times of the year.

To achieve this, we've applied various logic to a variety of scenarios depending on the state of the salary change and whether it has been approved or not.

Changes

Negotiating Body Uplifts where ‘Override Approval’ is selected will now supersede already-approved Salary records for the same effective date.
For members of staff who have not yet had their pay increment approved, a Negotiating Body uplift that overrides approval will update the Pending Approval increment to the new Negotiating Body rate, but also add a new pre-approved salary line that reflects the uplift as well for their current scale. This new salary change for their old scale will be superseded once the increment has been approved.
A member of staff may have two pending approval records for the same effective date if their pay increment and negotiating body uplift both require approval. In this scenario, whichever record is approved will force the other one to be rejected. This is to ensure there only remains one approved record for an effective date.

For further information or reference images, check out our release note pdf.