The new academic year begins on August 1st 2026. Preparations for the change of academic year have been ongoing for some time and the changes made to bud in preparation for this can be found in the following articles:
26/27 ILR Specification updates
26/27 Apprenticeship Funding Rules
To support the 2026 to 2027 academic year we need to perform several essential technical changes.
To release these changes, we will be taking the Bud platform offline from:
- 11pm on 31st July to approximately 3am 1st August
When the changes have been completed and the platform reinstated you will see a number of subtle changes as we stop supporting the 24/25 ILR and switch support to the 25/26 and 26/27 ILRs.
Your data will be automatically copied into the 26/27 ILR schema and the appropriate validation rules applied to it. You will be able to access and edit data for the outgoing 25/26 academic year up until the R14 submission window closes at 6 pm on the 22nd of October 2026 (at which point 25/26 data will become read-only).
Due to the transition between academic years a Data Warehouse (DWH) update will not occur on the night of the 31st July, but will resume as normal on the 1st Aug. This means you will not see your ILR data updated in the DWH until the morning of the 2nd August.
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