Correspondence

ESFA Update further education: 29 March 2023

Published 29 March 2023

Applies to England

1. Information: adult funding allocations for the 2023 to 2024 funding year

This week, we will issue allocations for the 2023 to 2024 funding year. These will include:

• ESFA funded adult education budget including National Skills Fund level 3 adult offer
• Advanced learner loan facilities and bursaries

A published timeline is available so that you know when to expect information from us and technical guidance will be updated alongside your allocation to explain how we have calculated your allocation.

We will not include 16 to 24 traineeships or AEB contract for services (procured from August 2021) allocations in March. These will be communicated in July 2023 so we can use the latest data available prior to 1 August to reflect most learners that started prior 31 July 2023. It is therefore important that you return accurate ILR data for the remainder of the academic year.

Please make sure you have access to Manage your education and skills funding so that you can view your allocation statement. You can request a new role through the Identity and Access Management Service or by asking your organisation’s super user.

Contract authorisers and/or managers will receive an email confirming when your allocation statement is available to view.

2. Information: update to the high needs funding 2023 to 2024 operational guidance

We have updated the high needs funding: 2023 to 2024 operational guidance.

The changes to the guidance are:

• update on the SEND and Alternative Provision Improvement Plan
• links to the 2023 School and Early Years Finance (England) Regulations
• updated 16 to 19 national funding rate
• 2022 to 2023 (academic year) in-year growth criteria (element 1 and element 2) for post 16 education
• additional information and guidance references about high needs place and dedicated schools grant deductions for new special and alternative provision free schools

The guidance provides a summary of key dates and actions for local authorities and educational providers, including how the 2023 to 2024 financial and academic year high needs funding system should operate for all types of educational provision. As this guidance is applicable to schools and colleges now, it should be considered with immediate effect.

3. Information: 2023 to 2024 student financial support scheme guides

The student financial support scheme guides set out the funding rules for the different schemes. They are reviewed and updated each year and we have recently published the guides for the 2023 to 2024 academic year for:

• 16 to 19 Bursary Fund
• Free meals in further education
• Residential Bursary Fund
• Residential Support Scheme

We ask that institutions review the updated guides and remind themselves of the funding rules which apply to each scheme to ensure they understand them, and their processes reflect them, including audit requirements.

The free meals in further education guide explains that the end date for transitional protections has now been extended further until March 2025. This is when we expect Universal Credit roll-out to be complete for most cohorts.

For the 16 to 19 Bursary Fund, institutions must remember that they should not award any student a fixed or flat rate of funding without assessing the actual needs the student has. The guide includes a checklist institutions can use when administering the bursary fund.

4. Information: 16 to 19 funding guidance for academic year 2023 to 2024

We have published the 16 to 19 rates and formula and 16 to 19 funding regulations guidance today for academic year 2023 to 2024.

Please read the what’s new sections in the guides first. These explain what we’ve changed for the new academic year. We’ve listed some of these changes here:

• increases to the national funding rates for study programmes and T Levels
• changes to programme cost weightings
• clarification on calculating the disadvantage block 2 factor for 14 to 16 year old direct funded students
• information on the updated baseline calculation for advanced maths premium
• updates to capacity and delivery fund (CDF) with information on the providers who are eligible
• we are not funding new starts on traineeships after 31 July 2023, and have updated the traineeships section to reflect this. We will fund continuing traineeship programmes according to the guidance
• confirmation that those coming to UK as foreign tourists are ineligible for 16 to 19 funding
• confirmation that the condition of funding requirements now also applies to students undertaking T Levels

5. Information: T Level guidance for academic year 2023 to 2024

We have published funding guidance for T Levels for the 2023 to 2024 academic year.

What’s new:

• new increased funding rates
• adjustment to tolerance rate for T Levels for 2023 to 2024
• new wave 4 T Levels which are available for funding.
• updated T Level programme cost weightings.
• confirmation that we will not use lagged student numbers for 2025 to 2026 allocations

If you have any questions after reading our guidance, please contact us using our online enquiry form.

6. Information: updates to adult education budget (AEB) guidance for 2022 to 2023

We have published updates to AEB guidance this week as follows:

Version 2 of the AEB funding rates and formula 2022 to 2023

• we’ve added information on how the earnings boost (as announced in ESFA Update on 1 March 2023) will work for the year 2022 to 2023, including some worked examples

AEB funding and performance management rules 2022 to 2023

• we’ve updated the administrative earnings thresholds in the unemployed and low wage thresholds sections of the rules to align with DWP rates. These rates will take effect on 1 April 2023.

7. Information: payment profiles for academic year 2023 to 2024

In January we said we would confirm payment profiles for academic year 2023 to 2024. This is part of the reclassification of further education (FE) colleges, sixth form colleges and designated institutions in England to the public sector.

From academic year 2023 to 2024 onwards, we will pay allocations in 12 equal instalments to the following institutions receiving 16 to 19 and adult education budget grant funding. We already pay local authority maintained and academy sixth forms in this way.

There is no change to the advanced learner loans bursary, and we will still pay this in 3 instalments: 50% in August, 25% in January and 25% in April.

7.1 16 to 19 funding (including high needs)

• FE colleges and all other FE institutions, including local authorities for their FE provision, independent learning providers and special post-16 institutions.

7.2 Non-devolved adult grant funding

• all grant funded institutions, including colleges and local authorities

It does not include independent learning providers.

8. Information: payment date change

In January, we explained by letter and update article that we’re changing the payment date for 4 of our funding streams:

• procured adult education budget including national skills fund
• procured 19 to 24 traineeships
• contract funded advanced learner loans bursary
• 16 to 18 traineeships

This is a reminder that the April payment for these funding streams will be in your bank account on 26 April 2023, the 16th working day of the month. We uploaded a contract variation to Manage your Education and Skills in February 2023 to reflect this change.

If you have any queries relating to this, please contact the enquiry service.

9. Information: FE Capital Transformation Programme funding announcement

The Department for Education (DfE) published details on the 28 March about the FE Capital Transformation Fund allocation, totalling £286m, through which capital funding will be targeted towards the poorest condition that still remains in the FE college estate. The eligible colleges and designated institutions and what they will get through the formula-based allocation can be found online. We are also publishing details of the formula alongside the allocation.

FE colleges eligible for funding will receive a grant agreement letter in April through the ESFA, which, if signed by 3rd May, will lead to the allocation being paid from May 2023. Guidance on what colleges can spend this funding on is available on GOV.UK.

All FE colleges have received investment through the FE Capital Transformation Programme. Details of the FE Capital Transformation Programme can be found on GOV.UK. This funding is part of the £2.8bn capital investment in skills over this spending review period.

10. Information: final qualification achievement rates (QAR) for 2021 to 2022

On Thursday 29 March, we will publish final QAR for 2021 to 2022 as part of the National Achievement Rate Tables through Explore our statistics and data.

As previously announced, for 2021 to 2022, education and training, apprenticeships and traineeships QARs are to be published at provider level.  This is a change from 2019 to 2020 and 2020 to 2021, when provider-level QARs were not published in response to Covid19.

Providers will be able to access their final QAR data for 2021 to 2022 through View Your Education Data portal in early April following the national data publication.

11. Information: new college benchmarking tool

The benchmarking data collected in the 2022 finance record was enhanced to include more relevant benchmarks for use by colleges, particularly for comparing curriculum planning data.

This new tool will allow colleges to compare themselves with a menu of ‘family groups’ of other colleges, using a range of curriculum planning efficiency metrics from a national data set that has never previously been available.

For this release the new curriculum planning benchmarking information will be available as a benchmark data set in an excel spreadsheet in View your education data (VYED).

Colleges will not be able to view individual data from other colleges, which will remain confidential to the college. A new benchmarking dashboard on VYED is currently being developed for use in future years.

Please log into your VYED account to access the 2022 tool which will be available from Thursday 30 March.

12. Information: Apprenticeships Accountability Framework

An update to the provider-facing Dashboard that supports the Apprenticeships Accountability Framework is due to be made later this week. Providers can view the Dashboard (available in test environment) in View your education data.

The updates will go live later this week and will include:

• Addition of Breaks in Learning metrics.
• Addition of Employer Feedback metrics.
• Fixed all End Point Assessment Organisation metrics to only look at apprenticeship programme records where the Funding Model is 36, the Programme Type is 25 and the Completion Status is 1.
• Fixed the Withdrawal rating to only look at records that have passed the funding qualifying period.

We will continue to update the Dashboard on a rolling basis, considering user feedback as we do so.

We will also be adding metrics for the quality indicators included in the Framework that are not yet shown in the Dashboard, including off-the-job training data, achievement and retention rates, and apprentice feedback.

The apprenticeship accountability framework came into effect in September 2021 and is a more timely, proactive approach to accountability for apprenticeship training providers, based on a wider range of quality metrics. Further clarifications were made to the policy in February 2023.