ESFA weekly round-up – Issue 373

Education & Skills Funding Agency’s weekly round-up of business-critical information to ESFA-funded colleges, other training organisations and direct grant employers. (27 Sept 2017)

Apprenticeship non-levy growth requests

You are now able to submit requests for increases to your 16 to 18 and adult non-levy contract value for the period May 2017 to December 2017.

Please send completed growth request forms to Provider Performance Management before 5pm on Friday, 29 September.

For further information or related queries, please contact your provider manager.

Apprenticeship data match errors

To ensure timely payments, it’s important that you work with your employers to ensure information in the ILR and the apprenticeship service is accurate and up to date before submitting your ILR data on the 4th working day of the month.

This is particularly important to prevent apprenticeship data match errors, caused when there is a no corresponding record or a mismatch of data against an apprentice’s record held on the apprenticeship service and the training providers ILR return.

ESFA are continuing to see large numbers of training providers submitting their first and final ILR on the last day of the ILR submission period and this does not allow any time to correct data lock errors with the employers you are working with.

The apprenticeship service provides an apprenticeship data match report when you submit an ILR and you should use this to identify any errors which require further action.

If you or your employer has issues regarding apprenticeship data match errors contact the helpdesk on 08000 150 600 or [email protected].

R14 hard close

It’s critical that you make any amendments to your 2016 to 2017 ILR data before the ILR hard close on the Thursday, 19 October. After this date you will not be able to fix any issues from your 2016 to 2017 ILR return and will not receive payment for this activity.

After this deadline you will be unable to:

• create and approve a new apprentice record with a start date within the 2016 to 2017 academic year
• create and approve a replacement record for any incorrect record that has been stopped and backdated
• make changes (such as the agreed costs) to any existing records to take effect prior to the 31 July 2017

For more information please refer to the apprenticeship technical funding guide and the ILR guides and templates for 2016 to 2017.

Updated apprenticeship funding and performance-management rules

ESFA have now published an updated version of the apprenticeship funding and performance-management rules that apply to apprenticeship starts from 1 May 2017 to 31 March 2019. A draft of the performance-management rules was published as part of the competition for the current non-levy apprenticeship procurement. These have now been integrated within the existing funding rules document; the funding rules have not changed. For 1 April 2018 to 31 March 2019, this document remains draft and ESFA reserve the right to make changes to these rules in line with government policy.

The 2016 to 2017 funding rules still apply to learners that started before 1 May 2017 but the performance-management rules for carry in learners are now included in the 2017 to 2019 rules.

For further information, please visit the funding rules page on GOV.UK.

Qualification achievement rate changes for 2016 to 2017

ESFA have published the high level changes to the qualification achievement rates (QAR) for the 2016 to 2017 funding year (1 August 2016 to 31 July 2017). ESFA will shortly publish the updated QAR dataset production specification documents for 2016 to 2017 which will incorporate these changes.

You should read this document alongside the business rules ESFA published in November 2016.

If you have any questions please contact the service desk.

Minimum standards 2016 to 2017: apprenticeships, AEB, ALL

ESFA have published a document explaining how ESFA will apply minimum standards for 2016 to 2017 to all age apprenticeships and to adult (19+) education and training provision funded through the Adult Education Budget and/or through Advanced Learner Loans.

If you have any queries, please contact the service desk.

Using the apprenticeship service as a training provider

ESFA have published information for apprenticeship training providers on using the apprenticeship service. It explains how to register on the apprenticeship service so you can add and approve apprentices for funding.

It’s important that the apprentices added to the apprenticeship service account match the details you have on the Individualised Learner Record. This will be checked as part of your month end submission.

ESFA have also published information for employers on the key things they need to consider when using the apprenticeship service.