The start date of the engagement.

All engagements.

For the first engagement relating to an instance, this will be the same as Instance.COMDATE. Where a student returns on the same learning aim from an agreed break in learning, the learning aim start remains the same as originally returned, but a new engagement start date is returned. As the two dates differ, the HESA system will use the learning aim start to populate the “original learning start date” in the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) ILR file created. This field does not otherwise exist in the HESA record.

All date fields in the Student record must be completed using the ISO8601 format of YYYY-MM-DD. The specification of this field falls within the scope of the Aligned Data Definitions and follows the Data Standards in the HESA student record.