Rollover is the process of copying courses from the current cycle to the next. This entry documents significant information and dates from the second Publish teacher training courses (Publish) rollover.
This is what we did for the first rollover in 2019.
Significant dates
- Rollover started
- 5 July 2020
- Rollover closed in Publish
- 6 October 2020
- Application start date for old cycle (2019 to 2020)
- 8 October 2019
- Application end date for old cycle (2019 to 2020)
- 30 September 2020
- Application start date for new cycle (2020 to 2021)
- 13 October 2020
- Application end date for new cycle (2020 to 2021)
- 3 October 2021
Communication to providers
The following email was sent to Publish users in June. (Notify link)
- Subject
- Information about your teacher training courses for 2021 – 2022
Dear colleague,
We’re writing to you about your courses for the 2021 – 2022 academic year, which will appear on Find postgraduate teacher training in October. This email sets out what you need to do over the next few months to prepare your courses for the new cycle.
How the process will work this year: checking and publishing your courses
From 3 July, we’ll duplicate all your current content (for 2020 – 2021) in Publish teacher training courses. This is sometimes known as the ‘rollover’ process. All your courses will be copied over (including withdrawn and unpublished ones).
From 6 July, when you sign in to Publish you’ll see a new section titled ‘Next cycle (2021 – 2022)’. In this section, you should:
- add any new courses you’re running for the first time in 2021 – 2022
- fact-check your rolled over courses (paying attention to any details that might change for the new academic year)
- delete any courses you’re no longer running
- check formatting (eg bullet pointed lists, hyperlinks and paragraph breaks)
- make sure your course locations are correct, and add any new ones
Once you’ve checked and edited your courses, you can line them up for publication by clicking the green ‘Publish in October’ button (you can still make further changes to them after doing this). Your courses will then appear on Find in early October when the new cycle opens.
Do I need to request permission for any courses?
You do not need to request permission to recruit trainees to any postgraduate teacher training courses other than fee-funded PE. Accredited bodies have until 10 July to request fee-funded PE – they can do this directly in Publish. You can publish all other courses without requesting permission.
What happens to my current courses?
You will still be able to view and edit your current courses after rollover. When you sign in to Publish from 6 July, you’ll find them in the section titled ‘Current cycle (2020 – 2021)’. This will be available until your new courses have been published in October.
Next steps
We’ll be in touch again in July to let you know that rollover has been completed and you can now view, edit and publish your courses for 2021 – 2022. In September, we’ll contact you with a specific date for when the new cycle will open.
If anyone else in your organisation needs to see this email, please forward it to them. If you have any questions, you can contact us at becomingateacher@digital.education.gov.uk.
Regards,
Becoming a Teacher team
The following email was sent to Publish users in July. (Notify link)
- Subject
- Review and publish your courses for 2021 – 2022
Dear colleague,
Last month we wrote to you about your courses for the 2021 to 2022 academic year. We told you that we were shortly going to start the ‘rollover’ process – duplicating all your current content in Publish teacher training courses.
We can confirm that rollover has been completed. You can now view, edit and publish your courses for 2021/22.
Check your new courses
When you sign in to Publish, you’ll see a new section titled ‘Next cycle (2021 – 2022)’. This contains copies of all your current 2020/21 courses, including withdrawn and unpublished ones.
In this section, you should:
- check any courses you want to run again in 2021/22, to make sure their details are correct for the new academic year
- add any new courses that you’re running for the first time in 2021/22
- check your course locations and add any new ones
We’d encourage you to pay particular attention to the formatting on your course pages. You should:
- click on any links to make sure they’re still working
- check that bulleted lists are displaying correctly
- insert paragraph breaks into long pieces of text, to make them easier to read
This is also a good time to review and improve the copy on your pages. Guidance and tips are available in Publish to help you with this – you’ll find these at the head of each of the free-text boxes (eg ‘About this course’, ‘Interview process’ and ‘How school placements work’).
Publish your courses
Once you’ve reviewed and edited your courses, you can line them up for publication to Find postgraduate teacher training. (You do not need to request permission to recruit to any courses, except fee-funded PE – accredited bodies have until 10 July to do this.)
To publish, hit the green ‘Publish in October’ button (you can still make changes to your courses after doing this). Your courses will appear on Find in October, when the new recruitment cycle opens, replacing your current courses.
Your current courses
You can still view and edit your current courses in Publish. You’ll find them in the section titled ‘Current cycle (2020 – 2021)’. This will continue to be available until October.
Note that, if you’re an accredited body and you’ve signed up for email notifications about course changes, you’ll only receive these in relation to courses that are currently live on Find. You will not be notified about changes to 2021/22 courses before they’re published in October.
Next steps
We’ll contact you again in September, to remind you to get your courses ready for the new cycle and to give you further information about when the cycle is due to open.
If anyone else in your organisation needs to see this email, please forward it to them. If you have any questions, you can contact us at becomingateacher@digital.education.gov.uk.
Regards,
Becoming a Teacher team
The following email was sent to Publish users in September. (Notify link)
- Subject
- New recruitment cycle for the 2021 to 2022 academic year
Dear colleague,
We emailed in July about reviewing and publishing your courses for the 2021 to 2022 academic year. This email sets out the dates for the end of the current recruitment cycle and the beginning of the new one.
Current cycle
The current recruitment cycle ends on 3 October 2020. Any existing courses will be removed from Find postgraduate teacher training on this date.
New cycle
The new recruitment cycle begins on 6 October 2020. Your courses will be visible on Find from this date.
Remember to Publish your courses before 6 October, after checking that they are correct and you have made any necessary updates.
Applications
Applications will open on 13 October 2020. If you had set an ‘Applications open’ date before this date, it will be changed to 13 October.
If anyone else in your organisation needs to see this email, please forward it to them. If you have any questions, you can contact us at becomingateacher@digital.education.gov.uk.
Regards,
Becoming a Teacher team
The following email was sent to Publish users in October. (Notify link)
- Subject
- 2021 to 2022 cycle opening tomorrow on Find
Dear colleague,
Courses for the 2021 to 2022 recruitment cycle will be published to Find postgraduate teacher training tomorrow, Tuesday 6 October.
If you have not already, you should go to Publish teacher training courses now and publish your courses. Do this by pressing the green ‘Publish in October’ button on the individual course pages.
If you do not do so, they will not appear on Find tomorrow. You must publish your courses to enable candidates to apply for them through UCAS or DfE Apply – applications open on Tuesday 13 October.
If you’ve already published your courses
If you’ve already published your 2021 to 2022 courses, you should check them in Publish to make sure they’re correct for the new cycle.
You can still edit published courses. Once you’ve made your changes, save them, and then press ‘Publish in October’.
If you have any questions, or need any help in adding your content, please contact us at becomingateacher@digital.education.gov.uk. If anyone else in your organisation needs to be aware of this email, please forward it to them.
Regards,
Becoming a Teacher team
Dev testing environments
In advance of rollover we set up a test environment to simulate putting Publish through the various rollover states. Essentially, this worked well, however, the rollover test environment and production were continually getting out of sync. New work happened in production but not mirrored in the test environment. In order to test updates intended for the new cycle, we had to continually update the test environment.
QA processes
API
We tested v1, v2, v3 endpoints and the public v1 endpoint.
Publish
We manually tested the create a course journey and sporadic checks of various screens and flows in both the ‘Current Cycle’ and ‘Next Cycle’ during rollover, and of Publish after rollover. We adopted a ‘click around and see if things are ok’ approach to our QA. We should introduce more structure to our rollover QA process in future.
We encountered a number of issues relating to error validation in this testing. While not directly linked to rollover this also highlighted room for improvement in our QA processes.
Development milestones
Before/during rollover
A spike which lasted at least 7 days.
https://github.com/DFE-Digital/find-teacher-training/pull/386
https://github.com/DFE-Digital/publish-teacher-training/pull/1304
https://github.com/DFE-Digital/teacher-training-api/pull/1520
After rollover
Rollover settings.
https://github.com/DFE-Digital/find-teacher-training/pull/461
https://github.com/DFE-Digital/publish-teacher-training/pull/1384
https://github.com/DFE-Digital/teacher-training-api/pull/1586
Course opening dates were updated on Find and Apply.
https://github.com/DFE-Digital/find-teacher-training/pull/462
Design and product updates
Financial incentives
Financial incentives had not been confirmed during the transition from the old cycle to new cycle so we introduced placeholder UI.
https://github.com/DFE-Digital/publish-teacher-training/pull/1352
https://github.com/DFE-Digital/publish-teacher-training/pull/1387
https://github.com/DFE-Digital/find-teacher-training/pull/464
Financial incentive for most courses were then removed.
https://github.com/DFE-Digital/teacher-training-api/pull/1589
Course fees
We uncoupled EU from UK course fees.
https://github.com/DFE-Digital/publish-teacher-training/pull/1374
https://github.com/DFE-Digital/find-teacher-training/pull/458
Age range
We made the age range field mandatory for all courses in the next cycle. This data was missing from approximately 14,000 / 15,000 courses. Rollover gave us the opportunity to collect this data.
Service performance
We enabled a rollover tab on the Publish performance dashboard to track providers progress in rolling over their courses. This cycle we will be able to compare progress between this rollover and the last one.
Langauge
Consistency of language was an issue during rollover. Dates referring to cycle (eg., 2019 to 2020) needed to be updated across the service. While a find and replace in the code base helped, there were several instances where manual updates needed to be made, such as the Google Form to create PE courses.
The default earliest “Applications open date” for courses was set to 8th October, copied over from the previous cycle’s start date. Since this date was pushed back for the new cycle, we needed to adjust the default and ensure the example start date for form completion was within the correct range.
Allocations during rollover
The allocations process for the 2020 to 2021 recruitment cycle overlapped with the rollover window.
Important dates
- Allocations window opened
- 8 June 2020
- Allocations window closed
- 10 July 2020
Design updates
We launched an interruption screen to communicate changes to recruitment policy. Users saw this on their first visit in the new cycle.
https://github.com/DFE-Digital/publish-teacher-training/pull/1376
Issues
We received support tickets (e.g., #9466) from providers who could not find their confirmed places. Users were looking in the ‘Next cycle’ section though we had only published them in the ‘Current cycle’ section.
Rollover copies over all courses from the previous cycle. This meant there were fee-funded PE courses automatically created in the new cycle which had not received permission to recruit. We had to contact the providers of these courses and inform them that we would withdraw the courses.
This email was sent to providers before the new cycle launched. (Notify link)
- Subject
- Permission to run fee-funded PE
Dear colleague,
In June and July, accredited bodies were able to request permission for them and their partners to offer training places on Early Years, Undergraduate and fee-funded PE courses in the 2021 to 2022 academic year.
We’ve noticed that you have a fee-funded PE course on Publish for 2021 to 2022, which is set to publish in October. You have not received permission to recruit for this course.
We are unable to permit the publishing of this course when the new cycle opens on 6 October. We will revert the course to an unpublished state on Publish, which will still be available to view. You do not need to take any action.
The window has now closed to request permission, but if you have any questions, contact us at becomingateacher@digital.education.gov.uk. If anyone else in your organisation needs to be aware of this email, please forward it to them.
Regards,
Becoming a Teacher team
This email was sent was sent to providers after the new cycle was launched. (Notify link)
- Subject
- Permission to run fee-funded PE
Dear colleague,
In June and July, accredited bodies were able to request permission for them and their partners to offer training places on Early Years, Undergraduate and fee-funded PE courses in the 2021 to 2022 academic year.
We’ve noticed that you have a fee-funded PE course on Publish for 2021 to 2022. You have not received permission to recruit for this course.
We are unable to permit the publishing of this course, so will withdraw it on Publish. It will still be available for you to view. You do not need to take any action.
The window has now closed to request permission, but if you have any questions, contact us at becomingateacher@digital.education.gov.uk. If anyone else in your organisation needs to be aware of this email, please forward it to them.
Regards,
Becoming a Teacher team
Some providers then had requests approved via support to keep these courses open.