Attendance Tracking

Following on from our first deployment in September, we have extended the Attendance Tracking functionality to Group Learning, giving you the ability to record attendance outcomes for your Workshop activities for multiple learners at once.

To record attendance outcomes via Group Learning, following the steps below:

• Select a Workshop activity within a group
• Select the learners to record an attendance outcome for
• Select the "Complete Activity" action
• Enter the attendance outcomes, along with all other completion information
• Select "Complete Activity"

This will then update all selected learners with the attendance information provided and complete the activity.

Please note that if a learner already has attendance outcomes recorded for that activity, then any new information recorded via Group Learning will not update the outcomes previously recorded.

You are not able to record attendance outcomes via Group Learning without completing or partially completing the activity. If you wish to record non-attendance then we recommend selecting the "Partial completion" option in Group Learning and then you will be able to keep the activity open until the learner completes their workshop. You can also continue to record attendance outcomes for individual learners via the learning plan.

Compliance Enhancements

We have made the following compliance enhancements:

• Feature switch for bulk OTJH
• Additional questions in the withdrawal process to flag learners at risk of becoming NEET
• Displaying working hours on the Training Plan document

OTJH Feature Switch

We have added a feature switch for recording bulk OTJH, giving you the flexibility to decide how you want to record OTJH in Bud.

The feature switch is defaulted to enabled, meaning that users will be able to record bulk OTJH when submitting work and when marking submissions. This is the existing behaviour in Bud.

If the feature switch is disabled, then users will not be able to record bulk OTJH when submitting or marking work. The option will be hidden and instead all OTJH will need to be recorded via the OTJH log for each activity, detailing the date & time for each entry. This will ensure greater compliance with the funding rules for OTJT.

If you are interested in disabling the bulk OTJH feature switch, then please discuss this with your Customer Success Manager.

When the feature switch is disabled, any previous bulk OTJH entries made will still be displayed and can be approved. We will not delete any OTJH entries.

Please note that even where the bulk OTJH is disabled, users will still be able to record bulk OTJH via the Group Learning functionality. This is because there is no OTJH log available in Group Learning.

Identifying NEET Learners

We have added new questions to the withdrawal process to help you identify potential NEET learners.

The first question asked is "Is the learner aged 16 or 17 at the time of withdrawal?" If the answer is "No", then no further questions will be asked. However, if the answer is "Yes", then the following questions will be asked:

• Will the learner remain in employment following their withdrawal from this programme?
• Will the learner remain in education or training following their withdrawal from this programme?
• Based on the above, is this learner at risk of becoming NEET (not in employment, education, or training)?

If "Yes" is answered to either question relating to the learner remaining in either employment or education, then additional questions will be asked to record the details of the employer or education provider, if known.

Please note that you can find the learner's age by navigating to the "Personal Details" page found under the "Settings" tab when viewing a learner.

Training Plan Document

We have added the applicant's working hours to the Training Plan document. They will be displayed in the "Employment" section of the document.

Bug Fixes

In this release, we have fixed the following bugs:

Incorrect OTJH in programme build - in some cases, the required OTJH displayed during the programme build of Bud was showing the January 2026 values. These have now been corrected to show the August 2025 values. We will provide an update to the text for the January 2026 values nearer the time.

Visa expiry details - we have fixed an issue where answers to the new visa expiry questions were failing to save.

Group Learning - we have fixed issues relating to 500 errors when attempting to open certain activities in Group Learning.

Training Plan Appendix A - in some cases, Appendix A of the Training Plan document was not showing the breakdown of activities.

Error message in funding document - We have updated the signature validation error message in the funding document to be consistent with all other compliance documents

Programme duration increasing for learners with a Break-in-Learning - We have resolved an issue where some learners were seeing their programme duration increase by the duration of their break when they returned to learning. This behaviour will now be consistent for all return from Breaks-in-Learning scenarios where the original planned duration will not be extended. 

Training provider signatures not saving when the employer is signed offline - We have fixed a bug where the training provider signature may have failed to save as expected if the employer signature was collected "offline". 

Planned hours updating after enrolment completed - The logic has been updated to ensure that once the initial enrolment has been completed, and the Planned OTJH Hours [PHours] field updated in the ILR, this value will not be changed unless a manual override is used.

Coming Soon

Custom Data Exports - We’re finishing up the last tweaks to Custom Data Exports, although this won't be included in this release as originally scheduled, we hope to make this available to customers in the coming weeks. In the mean time, please take some time to look through our guide to Custom Data Exports to familiarise yourself with this new feature. We also have a webinar introduction available to see the new feature in action.

Business Intelligence - Wednesday 15th October at 15:30

Standard Reports

In this release we have a few additions to the standard reports suite.

Additional Trainers

We have added a comma separated list of additional trainers to the in-flight learners report within Standards. This will allow you to have a quick and easy view of every trainer that is associated with a learning plan in one place.

Last day of learning

To help promote seamless gateway monitoring, we have added an additional field "Last Day of Learning" to the EPA Readiness Report in Standards.

Attendance Tracking

Following the addition of workshop activities and attendance tracking to the platform. We have added some fields to the All Activities Log within standards. These fields let you see key information at a learner level such as:

• Last attended workshop activity date
• Total Workshops planned
• Workshops run to date
• Count of workshops with each attendance status
• Overall workshop attendance %

We have also included specific workshop activity fields to the individual activity section of this page, detailing:

• Activity type
• Workshop attendance date
• Attendance status
• Attendance additional information

Data Retention - New report

To support the management and disposal of old records, we have introduced this retention report to the admin section of standards. The report, based on DfE Guidance, lists learners who have completed or withdrawn more than 6 years ago and can be used to help identify records you may wish to delete. 

Before requesting the deletion of any record, please ensure you validate each learning plan and follow your internal data retention policies, this report acts as a guide only.

If you would like Bud to delete records on your behalf, please follow the deletion request process here.

Employer Management - New report

We have added a new report within the admin section of Standards to help with your employer management. This report summarises all employers within Bud giving you key information about their Archived status, Employer contacts, certificate tracking and payments.

Management Reports

Following some feedback on the management reports, we have realised that many users were not aware of the additional Ofsted metrics and safeguarding data available. To help highlight these, we have added new navigation buttons to the main dashboard page.

Bug Fixes

Subsequent and Next planned support dates - Some dates were pulling through that were before the last delivered support, we have made the following changes to the field in the Datawarehouse and as such the fields in the reports;

Data Warehouse Fields

The following new fields have been added to the data warehouse in this release