Bulletin for December 2024

Learning Centre Portal date changes

The Learning Centre Portal is open early for attendance confirmations for the week ending Friday 20 December. You can submit your confirmations from Monday 16 December. This allows confirmations to be in place before the holiday period starts.

Please confirm attendances before close of business on Monday 23 December – rather than the usual Wednesday 5pm cut-off. If you submit attendance confirmations on time, we'll pay EMA payments for the weeks ending 13 and 20 December on Monday 30 December. Students will then have their payments in time for the new year. Please make students aware of this change.

You must return a weekly attendance confirmation for every student, whether they’re in attendance or not. Make sure to update your portal information before you leave for the winter break.

Please also submit attendance confirmations for any earlier, unconfirmed weeks. You can do this by checking if there's an 'unconfirmed weeks' box in the attendance worklist of your portal.

WGLG attendance confirmations and withdrawals

As we approach the last month of term 1, please make sure that you've confirmed all eligible WGLG students' attendances for this term by 20 December

If a student withdraws from their course mid-year please ensure their learning agreement status is up to date. This means changing their status to Withdrawn on the portal within 30 working days of the withdrawal date as per the service standards.

You can confirm term 2 attendance confirmations on your return in January 2025.

Service launch for academic year 2025/26 – application form deliveries

We're currently preparing for academic year 2025/26 applications.

If you're a non-Special Educational Needs school, we’ll send you half as many forms as we did before. If we sent you less than 20 forms, we’ll no longer send you a delivery as they can be downloaded and printed.

The online application service for academic year 2025/26 will be available from mid-spring, alongside paper applications. Special Educational Needs schools will get the same volume of forms as before.

Please encourage your students to apply online where possible, as this helps us process forms quickly.

To promote the online service, we’ll provide posters you can display in areas where students will see them. These will also be available in mid-spring for you to download and print from the LC Services website.

EMA/WGLG FE support desk – winter break hours

Our support desk team is available from 9am to 5pm Monday to Friday to answer any day to day operational questions about individual students, application processing, payments and system issues.

You can contact the support desk on 0300 200 4050 (option 6 for EMA queries, option 5 for WGLG FE) or email emainfo@slc.co.uk.

Over the winter break, opening hours will change slightly with an amended schedule between Tuesday 24 December and Thursday 2 January:

• Monday 23 December – 9am to 5pm
• Tuesday 24 December – 9am to 12pm
• Wednesday 25 December – closed
• Thursday 26 December – closed
• Friday 27 December – 9am to 5pm
• Monday 30 December – 9am to 5pm
• Tuesday 31 December – 9am to 12pm
• Wednesday 1 January – closed
• Thursday 2 January – closed
• Friday 3 January – 9am to 5pm

The support desk will return to business as usual on Friday 3 January 2025.