School Spring Census 2022

This is a reminder to all schools; census day is on Thursday 20th January.
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This is a reminder to all schools; census day is on Thursday 20th January.

Thank you to the schools that joined our webinar this morning (Monday 17th January 2022). Please do not be concerned if you were unable to attend as the Power Point and resources are all available on our ICT resources.

Link for the resources.

The latest fileset is 2003 – it has been emailed to all schools and available in Solus 3.

ESS have released the following information (Primary Schools): ‘The DfE is making a very late change to its specification regarding the date range for the funding of 4-year-old’s. The date range is being reduced from the 01/09/2016 – 31/08/2017 to the 01/01/2017 – 31/08/2017 (inclusive). We will take account of this very late change in the specification via Consolidated Database Patch D [4] for Autumn Release 2021 (Patch 26911) and Fileset 2002 (or above). The DfE will also be adjusting their validation and summary report files in line with this change is specification, but we don’t yet know when the replacement XSLT files will be provided to suppliers.’

Relevant changes for the Consolidated Database Patch D [4] (26911) for the Autumn Release – patch must be run before submitting Census Files.

After application of this consolidated database patch, Tools | Statutory Returns Tools | Update Early Years and the Early Years panel of Routines | Statutory Returns | School Census [Spring 2022] will take account of the reduced date range for 4-year-old funding.

The Patch has already been run at all schools that buy into the Helpdesk Upgrade and Patch service so no need to contact the desk to book in a time slot.


We know how busy it is, this time of the year for all school administrators and Business managers, we offer remote consultancy to ensure that the preparation of the school’s census return runs smoothly. If you are interested, please contact our SIMS helpdesk to book a one-off school census consultancy or add all School Census and School workforce Census for the year to your SLA. A date and time convenient to school will be scheduled and an allocated member of our SIMS team will guide you through the complexities of any user fixable errors and submitting the return to the DfE.

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