NCCIS - Youth-Transitions/resources GitHub Wiki

The National Client Caseload Information System (NCCIS) records the monthly post-16 activities in which young people are engaged. The data is assembled from returns from local authorities, which have statutory duties to help young people resident in their areas (even if educated in a different local authority) engage in education and training.

NCCIS was first introduced in 2010/11.

The population coverage has changed over time:

2010-2015: 16-19 year olds (or 16-24 with LDD) resident in each local authority area

2015-2017: 16-19 year olds (or 16-25 with SEND)

2017-2021: 16-17 year olds (or 18-24 with SEND)

SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities) refers to young people with either

  • An EHC (Education, Health and Care) Plan
  • A statement of SEN
  • A Learning Difficulty Assessment (LDA)

Pupils with SEND whose needs are met by schools and colleges but without one of the above are not in scope of the NCCIS SEND definition.

The period covered by LEO spans two SEN codes of practice. Statements (for pupils in schools) and LDAs (for those in colleges) were phased out from the start of 2013/14 and replaced by EHC Plans.

Processing

NCCIS uses academic years (the first month being September), but the month reported in the MonthNo is the calendar month (so September is 9 and January is 1). We convert these fields into a date (the 1st of the month) during processing to avoid confusion.

The SQL script collapses monthly records into spells. For example, in the case of a pupil who has 12 consecutive monthly records showing that they were in education, we collapse these into a single spell with a duration of 12 months.

We also collapse the detailed activity codes provided in NCCIS into a classification that has worked for our projects to date. This spell_type_code assigns a spell to one of the following categories:

  • in custody
  • in education
  • in employment
  • in training
  • NEET (not in education, employment or training), but economically active (looking for work, volunteer work, etc.)
  • NEET and not economically active (young carers, pregnancy, etc.)
  • self-employed

In some cases an individual may have multiple activities recorded for the same month (e.g. when data is supplied by two different local authorities). In these cases, if the same broad activity (from the list above) is recorded then we include that activity. However, when different activities are recorded we ignore those records. We make an exception in the case of custody where we assume an individual to be in custody if at least one record indicates this.