Agreement Overview

This Agreement represents a Service Level Agreement (“SLA” or “Agreement”) between the Department for Education (“DfE”) and the general public, concerning the LMI For All labour market information project.

This Agreement remains valid until superseded by a revised agreement.

This Agreement outlines the scope of the IT services covered as they are understood by DfE. This Agreement does not supersede the current terms and conditions unless explicitly stated herein.

Goals & Objectives

The purpose of this Agreement is to ensure that the proper elements and commitments to provide reasonably consistent service and data availability to the public are understood.

The objectives of this Agreement are to:

• Provide an overview of the stakeholders invested in the Service.
• Lay out the agreements on service quality and availability that DfE is willing to make on a best-effort basis.

Stakeholders

The following Service Provider(s) and Customer(s) will be used as the basis of the Agreement and represent the primary stakeholders associated with this SLA:

Service Provider: The UK Department for Education. (“DfE”)

Application Developer: An individual or entity making use of the DfE LMI For All Services and data to create LMI applications. (“the Developers”)

End User: A member of the general public or an institution, accessing information through the applications mentioned above. (“the Users”)

Periodic Review

This Agreement is not subject to scheduled periodic reviews by the DfE. Revisions and amendments will be considered on an ad-hoc basis whenever a change in the services covered by this Agreement is imminent. This Agreement remains permanently in effect until a revised Agreement is supplied and signed-off by the DfE.

Service Agreement

Service Scope

This Agreement generally covers the LMI For All API data service; an interface that allows applications to access various labour market data (“the Service”). This Agreement does not cover the Find a Job vacancy search part of the Service, which is provided by a third party.

DfE Responsibilities to Users

DfE agrees to:

• Provide reasonable usage of the Service free of charge to Developers and Users on a best-efforts basis.
• Attempt to minimize disruption of the Service, especially during UK office hours.
• Update the Service and its data as the practicalities of the project permit.

DfE Responsibilities to Developers

DfE agrees to:

• Make the Service available via HTTP/JSON, two commonly understood protocols.
• DfE does not agree to make all parts available to all developers at all times, as there may be access restrictions on newly launched API endpoints.
• Make reasonable efforts to maintain the request signatures and expected output structure of any given API endpoint for the lifetime of that endpoint’s API version, once the endpoint is released.

 Assumptions

For continuous operation of the Service and currency of the data, it is assumed that:

• No end-user or intermediary service engages in bulk download and storage of the data.
• Applications exhibit regular access patterns and request data on demand, i.e. in response to specific user requests, not automatically.

Service and Data Management

Service Availability

• DfE will make reasonable efforts to provide continuous operation of the Service, with the exception of planned maintenance. As this is a best-effort basis, no percentage or hours uptime guarantees are made.
• DfE will also make reasonable efforts to schedule maintenance timeframes outside UK office hours. As above, no explicit guarantees are made. There is no pre-announcement of upcoming maintenance timeframes.

Service Requests

• Basic email support is available at LMIforAll.dfe@education.gov.uk. DfE will attempt to respond to any support request within 7 working days, but this cannot be guaranteed.

Data Currency

• Data is kept up-to-date as project practicalities permit. Data is not guaranteed to be fault-free, but is periodically reviewed by a team of experts.

Closing Note

All parts of the Service are provided free of charge to the User and the Developer. DfE does not accept liability for any damages resulting from disruption of the Service, or faults in the data. This Agreement is provided to the general public on a best-effort basis and shall not be considered a legally binding document.