Correspondence

ESFA Update further education: 5 June 2019

Published 5 June 2019

This correspondence was withdrawn on 21 December 2020

This has been withdrawn as it’s out of date. Find the latest information from ESFA in the latest ESFA Update.

Applies to England

1. Action: year-end forecast claim for 2018 to 2019

The year-end forecast funding claim window will open on Friday 7 June 2019. You must submit a year-end forecast funding claim by 5pm on Wednesday 12 June 2019.

The claim form will now be on Submit Learner Data (as opposed to the Hub as in previous years). Non-compliance is a minor-breach of your contract.

You will need to submit a claim if you receive funds through:

• a grant for your adult education budget (AEB)
• a grant for your 16 to 19 funding
• a grant with an Advanced Learner Loans Bursary contract
• a Learner Support contract
• a Community Learning contract

Once you have submitted your claim you will also be able to view it on the Manage your education and skills funding.

If you have any queries about this please contact your Territorial Manager.

2. Action: end-point assessment organisation (EPAO) validation switching to an error from R12

We will be switching the ‘EPAOrgID_01’ validation rule from a warning to an error from R12.

This means that if you record an EPAO that has not been approved to carry out the end point assessment for the apprenticeship standard being delivered on your learner data records within your ILR file, it will fail validation.

This will result in you not being paid for those learners and any funding previously paid for these learners in 2018 to 2019 will be recovered.

Please make sure that you have recorded the end-point assessment organisation correctly in your R12 data submission to avoid failing validation.

Details of the organisations approved to conduct end-point assessments can be found on GOV.UK. This information is updated monthly.

The validation rules are published on GOV.UK.

3. Information: 2019 to 2020 ESFA funded adult education budget increases and business cases

When ESFA funded adult education budget allocations were issued in March, we committed to review them in May using 2018 to 2019 data to identify any providers with significant performance increases.

We have now reviewed allocations and will issue updated allocations statements next week through Manage your education and skills funding for providers who will be receiving an increase.

We will update our technical guidance document with the methodology we used to calculate increases shortly.

We also ran a business case process following 2019 to 2020 allocations to allow providers to tell us if they had experienced a significant technical error. We will communicate the outcomes of this process by the end of June.

Please contact your local territorial team lead if you have any queries.

4. Information: 16 to 19 funding regulations guidance

We have published the 16 to 19 funding regulations guidance for academic year 2019 to 2020 on GOV.UK.

We have made some small changes this year and to help you we have listed these in the front of the guide.

If you have any queries please contact us using our online enquiry form.

5. Information: change in payment dates from August 2019

We are changing the date on which we make payments from August 2019.

We are combining the adult payment dates into one and will pay the following funding streams on the 14th working day of the month:

• adult education budget (AEB)
• apprenticeships
• Advanced Learner Loans Bursary
• European Social Fund (ESF)
• National Careers Service
• 16 to 18 traineeships
• career learning pilots

Any payments relating to these funding streams will reach bank accounts on 20 August 2019, and then on the 14th working day thereafter.

If you have any questions, please contact us via email at payment.queries@education.gov.uk.