EFA e-bulletin for academies: 17 March 2016
Published 17 March 2016
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This publication is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/efa-e-bulletin-17-march-2016-issue-122/efa-e-bulletin-for-academies-17-march-2016
1. Information: post-16 allocation statements for 2016 to 2017 academic year
Final allocation statements for special post-16 institutions (excluding student support allocations) and non-maintained special schools (NMSSs) (including student support allocations) will be available by 18 March 2016. All statements, including those uploaded in February 2016 are available on EFA Information Exchange and can be found in the ‘revenue funding’ folder under ‘AY 2016-17 (2016/17)’.
All statements issued so far to schools, academies and FE colleges exclude allocations of student support funding. We will shortly begin to upload revised statements inclusive of student support funding. We expect the revised statements for these institutions to be issued by 24 March 2016. These revised statements will not include any outcomes for business cases. Business cases will be processed after the deadline of 8 April 2016. Institutions will be informed of outcomes by the end of May 2016.
Final allocation statements for charitable and commercial providers will also be available on EFA Information Exchange by the end of March 2016 (including student support allocations).
If you have any queries about allocation statements, please refer to our allocations statements guidance or you can contact us via our online enquiry form. If you have any problems using EFA Information Exchange, please check our support guidance.
2. Information: EFA Information Exchange improvements
In response to your feedback, we’ve made some improvements to EFA Information Exchange.
You can now give a star rating to questions and answers in Knowledge Centre. We’ll use your feedback to make improvements, so please do take a moment to rate answers as you use them. All EFA-funded providers can access Knowledge Centre via EFA Information Exchange.
We’ve also simplified naming convention requirements for when you upload documents to Document Exchange. The system now accepts documents with special characters in the title (such as hyphens) to reduce errors.
In Document Exchange we’ve also added a ‘document purpose’ field. This will ensure there’s a clear purpose recorded for every document we ask you to upload. When we next ask you to upload a document, we’ll make it clear for what purpose you’ll need to use.
Finally, we’ve added the ability for you to upload zip and zipx file formats to Document Exchange. If we need to ask you to upload anything in this format, we’ll provide clear instructions to help you do this.
If you have any issues using EFA Information Exchange, please follow our online guidance.
3. Information: schools financial health and efficiency
We have now issued most funding allocations for 2016 to 2017. To inform the budget planning process for next year, now is a time that many schools are taking a close look at what they could do to improve their financial efficiency.
To help with this, you are strongly advised to take a look at the schools financial health and efficiency collection of guidance and tools that we launched in January 2016.
Developed with school leaders and representative organisations, the collection brings together existing information and new tools and guidance into one place, to help you make the best use of your resources. For example, it includes guidance on managing budgets, effective procurement and how to achieve greater efficiency by benchmarking with other, similar schools.
4. Information: secondary maths and physics – opportunity for grant funding
The National College for Teaching and Leadership (NCTL) is inviting applications from lead schools, on behalf of groups of schools, to apply for grant funding to design and deliver teacher subject specialism training (TSST) in secondary maths and/or physics in 2016 to 2017 and 2017 to 2018.
This builds on the success of TSST in 2015 to 2016 and forms part of the 5 year commitment to transform Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) teaching in England.
The closing date for applications is Thursday 28 April 2016 at 5pm.