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ESFA Update academies: 17 April 2024

Published 17 April 2024

Applies to England

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Action: Review your hours for 16 to 19 qualifications and non-qualifications delivery before submitting your R09 ILR data return

The Education Skills and Funding Agency (ESFA) has identified 2 specific areas where numerous providers have data errors. To reduce your errors, and the chance of being selected for audit, use the post-16 monitoring reports dashboard to review the following reports:

  • FRM43 – 16 to 19 study programme students on qualifications with no planned learning hours (PLH)
  • FRM56 – 16 to 19 study programmes with PLH but no regulated qualifications

You must ensure your PLH and employment, enrichment and pastoral hours accurately reflect the qualifications and non-qualifications activity being delivered in the current academic year. 

The PLH field must reflect the total planned timetabled hours spent on Department for Education (DfE) approved qualifications only. You must record PLH for these qualifications on the individualised learner record (ILR).

You need to return a value of zero PLH if the learner is participating solely in employability, enrichment, and pastoral activities during the year, and is not enrolled on a 16 to 19 study programme including qualifications. Do not record a value above zero in the PLH field for non-qualifications.

Action: Use the final instalment of your National Tutoring Programme funding

Schools will receive their third and final instalment of National Tutoring Programme (NTP) funding in April or May and have until 31 August 2024 to spend it. You can choose how much of your school’s allocation to spend, depending on your needs and priorities. 

We encourage you to consider tutoring for:

  • disadvantaged pupils
  • pupils with SEND
  • pupils with persistent absence
  • pupils preparing for exams

You can also deliver tutoring during the summer holidays. Read the blog by Harvey Grammar School on how they used their NTP grant to introduce holiday tuition.

To support you in planning and tracking your tutoring for academic year 2023 to 2024, you can use our calculator tool and watch this short video on how to use it. 

short video

As this is the final year of NTP, we encourage schools to continue to deliver tutoring using core budgets, such as pupil premium from the academic year 2024 to 2025, onwards.

Information: 16 to 19 Bursary Fund audit guide

ESFA has published the 16 to 19 Bursary Fund audit guide, which includes the audit working papers we use. This guide is designed to help local authorities obtain assurance that institutions are administering the 16 to 19 Bursary Fund properly and refers to activity in the 2023 to 2024 academic year.

Although the guide is aimed primarily at local authorities, other institutions may find it helpful to review the information about ESFA assurance and audit as they review their bursary fund processes and policies ahead of the new academic year.

Information: Spaces available on the free school business professional webinars on Tuesday 23 April

The Schools Commercial team host free webinars on how using DfE approved frameworks could save you time and help your school or trust get value for money.  The following 30 minute webinars take place on Tuesday 23 April.

Follow the links to find out more and book your place:

View the summer term schedule to see the full list of webinars for the summer term.

The latest Buying for Schools blog post is now live and has been written by Stacey Speakman, Commercial Lead for ‘get help buying for schools’, the DfE’s free procurement service for schools and trusts. 

In her blog post, Stacey explains why the service wants to work with schools and trusts to ensure they are getting not just value for money, but wider social value from their procurements, and why buyers shouldn’t be afraid to ask suppliers what additional value they can bring to the table.

To find out more, read the blog post on GOV.UK.

Information: Continuous improvements to your digital services from DfE

DfE are working to bring together services and information from the department into one, easy-to-navigate place, to aim to improve your experience of the information provided and support workload reduction.  They have created DfE Connect which gives an overview of upcoming mandatory finance and funding tasks for pre-16 academies and links to wider help and support. 

Over time, we will be adding more information and services to DfE Connect to meet the needs of all academies, local authority-maintained schools, and academy trusts. We would be very grateful if you could try the DfE Connect service and provide us with feedback using the link at the bottom of the page. 

If you would like to take part in a range of further research opportunities to help improve our DfE services including DfE Connect, email school-account.comms@education.gov.uk.

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