Guidance on changes to Gateway Specifications following DfE announcements.
Following the DfE announcement regarding the changes to Functional Skills and Apprentices age.
We would like to clarify what changes epaPRO can assist you with.
Unfortunately we will not be able to make changes to the editing of gateway specs, to allow you to amend mandatory components to be optional, or to allow editing of the declaration.
The reason for this is because if these fields were editable, they would retrospectively apply any changes to all apprentices that had gone through gateway.
Therefore you will need to use the copy function on the Gateway Specifications in order that you can create a copy of these which will allow you to update them to meet the new requirements.
Don't forget if your Standard has specialisms, these will need to be ticked within the Gateway Specification, under the Standard tab as per the example below.
How to Build your Entities Guide -
Feature - EP-3085 Entity Management - Copying Entities
You will be able to build these and leave them inactive until such a time as you wish to roll these out. At which point you would mark the older gateway spec to being Inactive and activate the new ones.
We would recommend this is done out of your working hours to prevent any issues with apprentices going through gateway at the time.
We have added a change into your current UAT (release 5.32.0) a change to epaPRO that will mean the apprentices age at the start of their programme will be visible in the gateway screens and on the apprentice side drawer as per
EP-4955 Gateway - Calculate and display apprentice age at programme start date