What Are the Prison Education Program Reporting Requirements?

Electronic Announcement GENERAL-26-56 outlines the Prison Education Program (PEP) reporting requirements under 34 CFR 668.239. The school must submit a Prison Education Program Annual Report for each award year. Per the announcement:

"There are two aspects to this required reporting: 

• Institutions must provide information about every Pell Grant awarded to a student enrolled in a PEP. This is accomplished using a template through the Common Origination and Disbursement (COD) website (cod.ed.gov). By completing this report, institutions link additional information about the student receiving a Pell Grant to the data reported in COD, which includes data from the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA®) form. Both the template and the method to submit the completed report are available in COD.
  
  
• Institutions also must complete a school survey that collects information about the schools’ PEP(s) offerings themselves. This survey covers a range of topics, such as the challenges the institution faced when offering its PEP, student transfer and release data, the types of services being provided to incarcerated students, and how satisfactorily the “best interests” of incarcerated students are being monitored. ED will contact PEP institutions with instructions to access the institution survey portion of the required annual PEP reporting."

Reporting Deadline: The school is required to complete both the report in COD and the school survey about students enrolled in their PEP(s) for the 2025-26 award year by December 31, 2026. See the September 21, 2026, Federal Register.

Previous Announcement: The U.S. Department of Education (ED) previewed these reporting requirements in RR-Q1/A1 of ED's Prison Education Programs Questions and Answers.

Reporting Questions: Questions about PEP reporting go to [email protected].