ESFA Update academies: 26 February 2020
Published 26 February 2020
Applies to England
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1. Action: Teachers’ Pensions – update your contact details online
Teachers’ Pensions have made it simpler for employers to update their contact details.
On your Employer Portal dashboard, you’ll find an online form to add new or amend existing contacts.
Going forward, Teachers’ Pensions will need a named primary contact, who has overall responsibility for the pension administration duties for your academy trust, including keeping staff up to date with the latest scheme news. This must be a personal work email address and not a group inbox address (such as info@, admin@), as emails often can’t be sent to these addresses. This will ensure that you receive all Teachers’ Pensions communications.
Now that you can do this online, please do add the regular review and update of this information to your ‘to do’ list, so you do not miss out on important announcements.
2. Reminder: academy trusts to supply or update their contact details information
Academy trusts must provide ESFA with a direct email address for members and trustees, as set out in the Academies Financial Handbook, sections 2.51 – 2.55.
Keeping these details up to date makes sure members and trustees can receive important information direct from ESFA .
If your trust has not supplied these details, there is guidance to help you provide your governance contact information.
You can supply or update contact details, using Get information about schools (GIAS), when there are new appointments, or changes to any of your governance roles.
If you have any questions or concerns about supplying the information please contact us using our online enquiry form.
To add and maintain your member and trustee email addresses to the GIAS database is a requirement in the Academies Financial Handbook. This also ensures important messages and information issued directly to members and trustees are received.
3. Information: funding allocation statements for 2020 to 2021
We started to upload 16 to 19 statements for schools and academies with sixth form provision last week. We expect most statements to be available by the end of February and the remainder by the end of March. We have published a short video and guidance to help you understand your allocation statement. Please use your allocation calculation toolkit and guidance to understand the data we have used.
The deadline for business cases is 30 April 2020 and we will apply minimum thresholds to decide whether we will consider your case. Please review the thresholds before submitting your business case.
We are on track to upload pre-16 allocations for academies that opened before or on 1 January 2020 by the end of March 2020. We have published the academy general annual grant allocation guidance to help you understand your statement.
You will find your statement on ESFA Information Exchange in the Document Exchange ‘Revenue Funding’ folder, under ‘AY 2020-21 (2020/21)’. Your allocation includes a breakdown of our calculation.
Please contact us using our online enquiry form if you have any questions after reading the guidance.
4. Information: pupil premium conditions of grant for 2020 to 2021
Following January’s announcement of the pupil premium rates for 2020 to 2021 we have now published the pupil premium conditions of grant for the 2020 to 2021 financial year.
5. Information: year 7 literacy and numeracy catch-up premium: 2019 to 2020
We have published the year 7 literacy and numeracy catch-up premium allocations and conditions of grant for 2019 to 2020.
6. Information: free school meals supplementary grant 2019 to 2020
We have published the conditions of grant and allocations for the free school meals supplementary grant for 2019 to 2020.
7. Information: consultation on proposed changes to the Keeping Children Safe in Education guidance
We have launched a consultation on proposed changes to the Keeping Children Safe in Education guidance and would encourage colleges, schools and staff, particularly designated safeguarding leads (DSLs) and senior leaders to respond. We are updating our guidance for DSLs to ensure that they have a greater focus on improving the academic achievement of children who have experienced adversity and trauma, as part of their existing safeguarding duties.
We want to hear your views on what additional resources, training or support would help DSLs to carry out their role successfully so that we can make sure the right support is in place when these changes are introduced.
We would be grateful if you could submit your response by 21 April 2020.
8. Your feedback: tell us about your challenges when buying everyday goods
The Department for Education (DfE) is conducting research to understand the needs and challenges when buying common goods such as stationery, office supplies, text books and sports equipment.
Your comments will help to inform the development of guidance and services to better support schools in this area. The survey will take around 10 minutes to complete and all responses will be anonymised after entry.
Please complete the schools buying survey by Friday 6 March 2020.
9. Your feedback: we would welcome your feedback on a new online form to report extremism concerns
As part of our work to help the education sector raise any matters or concerns that arise on extremism, we would like to speak to the sector to receive their feedback on a new online form.
DfE offer a service for anyone to report a concern relating to extremism within an educational environment using email or phone. We are currently working on an online form as an additional anonymous method to use the service. To ensure that the form is intuitive and easy to use, we’re looking for some volunteers to help us with our research. The research session will consist of you going through a test version of the form.
If you wish to take part in the research, where we will spend 30 to 45 minutes speaking to you on a 1 to 1 basis, either remotely using Skype or during a site visit, please email DataScience.USERRESEARCH@education.gov.uk by Friday 6 March 2020.
10. Your feedback: can you help us to understand whether/how a public financial health measure of schools and academies could be useful to you?
We are looking for volunteers from academy trusts to help inform our user research on the notion of a potential publicly available measure of schools’ financial health.
We are interested in:
- what do you think of the idea?
- might one be useful?
- could it be misused?
- how might one be shaped to the benefit of both institutions and the public?
We’re interested in understanding whether you think this could be a helpful tool to you and how you might use it.
We will be conducting face-to-face interviews between Wednesday 19 February to Monday 16 March 2020 and will travel to you.
If you are interested in taking part in any research interviews please contact our User Researcher.