Provider

Yes. It is mandatory for providers to take part in the survey if they are being funded through the GLA’s Adult Education Budget. This includes adult skills and community learning, and grant-funded as well as procured provision.

IFF is unable to administer the baseline survey directly because we have no access to learners’ contact details at the point they start their course. For this reason, the baseline survey has to be administered via providers. IFF will handle the follow-up survey completely as by that stage we will have access to learners’ contact details: no provider involvement is needed for the follow-up.

You can find details on how to administer the survey on the main provider page of this website, or for more information see the full guidance PDF sent to all providers by IFF Research. If you do not have the guidance PDF, please contact your IFF Liaison Officer at LLSTeam@IFFResearch.com.

All learners on GLA AEB-funded courses are eligible to take part in the survey, excluding taster courses.

Many providers choose to offer ‘taster’ courses which should last a maximum of two weeks, but in most cases take part in one or two sessions. They should have been designed only to allow learners to decide whether they want to progress to a subsequent learning programme, and not aiming to deliver any other outcomes on their own.

Our understanding is that most taster courses in Community Learning are very short, but that they may occasionally be longer within Adult Skills provision.

The survey should be disseminated to all GLA-AEB funded learners, including Community Learning.

The GLA is keen to understand the benefits of all the learning aims it funds. This includes courses with relatively few Guided Learning Hours, and so we are asking you to include any learners enrolled in any GLA-funded learning.

Yes – learners can complete the survey if they are not eligible (or have not yet been submitted for funding) and they will all be included in the prize draw. IFF will remove any ineligible learners once data is matched with the ILR data. This matching will be done several months after they complete their course. However, as far as possible providers should try to only invite learners who are, or are likely to be, GLA AEB-funded.

If you have a class which includes both GLA AEB-funded learners and other learners (e.g. self-funded or ESFA AEB-funded learners), you can invite all the learners to complete the survey (to avoid having to distinguish between different types of learners on the same course). IFF will suppress any ineligible survey completes from the main data outputs after we have matched baseline completes to the ILR data.

In that case, yes, it is absolutely fine to target specific learners if this is possible and you are happy to do so. While we can remove any learners from analysis who are ineligible later on, if the proportion of ineligible learners in a class is likely to be high then it is beneficial to just target those who are eligible from the start.

We do not currently plan to block any learners based on their postcode. Where providers have both GLA AEB-funded and non-GLA AEB-funded learners within the same class, we do not want tutors to have to distinguish between different groups of learners if this could cause confusion (as learners may well not be aware of different funding circumstances), therefore the survey has been set up to allow non-eligible learners to take part if necessary. These will then be removed from the final dataset at a later date once we have matched their details with the ILR.

If a learner is starting more than one course within the same term, or within 90 days, they only need to complete the baseline survey once. If they try to complete the survey a second time, they will get a message to say they don’t need to complete it again– as long as they enter the same student ID each time. However, if learners are starting different courses more than 90 days apart, we would like them to complete the baseline survey again, as their circumstances may have changed, and it is important that we capture current data as close as possible to the start of each course.

If you sub-contract GLA AEB-funded provision (excluding taster courses), this is eligible for the survey and learners enrolled with sub-contractors should be invited to take part. The main contractor is responsible for ensuring that the survey information is cascaded to sub-contractors and that all eligible learners are invited to participate.

The survey is designed to be completed mainly online but paper and telephone alternatives are available for learners who need them. You should distribute the survey to students in a variety of ways: via an information leaflet at enrolment, by emailing the survey link direct to learners, and via tutors in classes promoting the survey (and offering the option to complete in class if possible). A batch of paper copies of the questionnaire, with reply paid envelopes, will be sent to your institution for any learners that are unable to complete the survey online and need to do it on paper. Learners who speak English as an additional language can complete a translated survey online if the available translations are suitable for them. Alternatively, we are also offering telephone interviews in other languages that they can request from the survey homepage.

The survey has been designed to be as straightforward as possible, but we recognise that some learners may have difficulties completing it due to language or literacy issues or lack of digital skills to get online.

Learners can complete the online survey in 13 languages: English, Arabic, Bengali, Kurdish Sorani, Polish, Portuguese, Somali, Spanish, Russian, Tamil, Turkish, Ukrainian and Urdu.

On the survey homepage, learners can request to complete the survey in a different language by telephone.

At the start of the academic year, a limited number of paper questionnaires, with pre-paid envelopes, were made available to providers who specifically requested them. Similarly, a limited number of paper alternative questionnaires, which are designed to be accessible to learners with learning difficulties, were made available to providers upon request at the start of the academic year. After the allocations are made in August 2022, it will not be possible for learning providers to request ‘top-up’ paper questionnaires and any paper questionnaires that are not part of the allocation (i.e. self-printed) will not be processed by IFF Research. Please also feed back to your liaison officer at IFF about any substantial difficulties your learners are facing.

From the original pilot, we learned that most ‘technical problems’ were students not understanding how to complete the survey, so the first point of call would be tutors. However, we have distributed a how-to guide for filling in the survey which we hope will reduce the number of questions asked of tutors (and which tutors themselves can use of a guide). We will also include troubleshooting information on the learner website FAQ page, so learners can be signposted there for help. Any major technical issues (e.g. no learners can access the link) can be referred to the team at IFF.

This isn’t something we expect providers to be able to do, but we are happy in principle for this to happen if necessary, and if the provider wishes to do so.

Based on analysis previous survey completes, it should take learners around 10-12 minutes on average, but we recognise that some learners may take longer than this. Learners can complete the survey in stages if they enter their email address at the start, as this enables us to send them a new link which they can use to pause the survey and return to where they left off, if they need to finish it later.

The full survey is available online in 13 languages: English, Arabic, Bengali, Kurdish Sorani, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Somali, Spanish, Tamil, Turkish, Ukrainian and Urdu.

Yes – a provider reference copy of the questionnaire will be distributed to all providers. If you have not received this, please contact your IFF Liaison Officer.

No, we can’t show which students have completed the survey. This is for two main reasons: 1) Data protection rules mean that we need to keep this confidential, and 2) We may not initially know which students have taken part, as it depends on what information they give us at the baseline stage. We ask for student ID, name and date of birth, but these are optional.

The GLA requires providers to meet a target response rate of 50%. Providers should disseminate the survey to all learners, remind and encourage them to complete the survey as much as possible.

Each provider will have access to an online dashboard which they can access to see the number of their live survey responses at any point after the survey goes live.

We will not know which courses learners are on when they complete the baseline survey (this data will only be matched on from the ILR, several months later) so it will not be possible to include this on the dashboard.

Yes, results from the mainstage survey will be shared with specific providers in anonymised / aggregate form so that you can see the overall results from your own learners.

Yes, the follow-up survey will ask for feedback on courses that the learners have undertaken, so at the mainstage providers will get to see the feedback (in anonymised / aggregate form) that their learners have given their courses.

The survey asks for the Learner Reference Number, which is the number that providers give to their students on enrolment. This is “LearnRefNumber” in the ILR. It is not the ULN. It is very useful if students give us this number but it is optional in the survey.

We will use the student number in two ways – to check if a learner has already completed a baseline survey and does not need to do it again, and to allow us to match the data from the baseline survey to the ILR (by looking up the number entered in the survey against the “LearnRefNumber” field in the ILR).

It is not mandatory to enter a student number, and learners will be able to complete the survey without one – in that case we would use other information (such as name, date of birth etc.) to match each learner to their ILR record.

However, without a learner number we won’t be able to flag to learners if they have already completed the survey previously, so to avoid any extra burden on learners it may be helpful if you were able to allocate student numbers to your learners for this reason.

Our system will combine the Learner Reference Number entered by the learner with the provider ID code to create a unique identifier for that learner, and it can use that unique ID to check if that learner has already completed a baseline survey.

The survey will generate evidence about all outcomes from adult education, not just the more ‘traditional’ economic measures relating to work or progression into further education. Hence, the survey asks about a range of wider outcomes including wellbeing, self-efficacy, and social interactions.

A description of social class is currently not included in the questionnaire. The questionnaire was thoroughly tested before the pilot, and our analysis of pilot responses showed there wasn’t a higher level of ‘Don’t know’ responses at this question compared to others, which suggests learners generally were not confused by the question. Also note that the question does not ask learners to identify what social class they belong to – just their perception of whether they interact with people from different social classes to their own.

Yes – there is a specific section within the Tutor FAQ document that answers this question. The learner information leaflet also sets out that these kinds of questions are asked and explains why.

As the survey must remain confidential we can’t contact specific learners based on their responses, however if learners give any indication during the telephone interviews that suggests they are at immediate risk of harm, we would flag this with the relevant learning provider (as safeguarding concerns would override GDPR). Also, if any learners give very low scores across all the wellbeing measures, they will be signposted to information on where they can find help at the end of the survey.

IFF Research have ISO27001:2013 accreditation, the gold standard of data security, and CyberEssentials. This means all our processes are geared towards meeting stringent data security requirements. We adhere to the GDPR and learners will get information on how their data will be used, where it will be stored and when it will be deleted, at the start of the survey. Learners’ contact information is stored on our secure servers at IFF and only members of the project team have access to it.

The ILR allows learners to opt in or out of being contacted for general market research, however it does not exclude people from research informing government policy, such as the London Learner Survey. Under the ‘public task’ lawful basis, and in line with the ILR privacy notice, we are permitted to invite all learners to take part in the London Learner Survey, and so will expect the invites to be sent to all in-scope learners (regardless of whether they agreed to be contacted for general market research by other third parties).

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