Correspondence

ESFA Update further education: 8 May 2024

Published 8 May 2024

Applies to England

Action: Use your 16 to 19 tuition funding before the end of the 2023 to 2024 academic year

You have until the end of the 2023 to 2024 academic year to spend your 16 to 19 tuition fund allocation. The Department for Education (DfE) has confirmed that this is the final year for this funding. 

As in previous years, the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) will review the end of year spend and recover any unspent funding. Refer to our guidance for a full list of eligible activities and spend. We have added summer schools to the list of eligible activities in section 7.4. 

Information: ESFA 16 to 19 Bursary Fund and Care to Learn guides for 2024 to 2025

Our student financial support scheme guides set out the funding rules for the different schemes. We review and update them annually and we have recently published the guides for the 2024 to 2025 academic year for: 

• 16 to 19 Bursary Fund
• Care to Learn

Review the updated guides and remind yourself of the funding rules which apply to each scheme to ensure that you understand them, and that your processes and documentation comply with them, including audit requirements. 

For the Bursary Fund, we would like to highlight 2 key points:  

1. You must assess the needs of all individual students when you award funding. This means you must award each student support based on their actual participation needs, not make flat or fixed rate payments to students that do not reflect the actual costs they face.

2. You cannot carry forward bursary funding for more than one year. For the academic year 2024 to 2025, that means you must tell us the total amount of any unspent funds (not previously reported) from any year up to and including the 2022 to 2023 academic year.

Information: Payments for Care to Learn and 16 to 19 Bursary Fund 

ESFA has published data showing aggregate payments made to childcare providers and education institutions, for both Care to Learn and the 16 to 19 Bursary Fund for students in defined vulnerable groups. The data will show payments made from Thursday 1 September 2022 through to Thursday 31 August 2023. 

The Care to Learn scheme helps young parents (aged 20 years and under) to continue in education after the birth of a child. ESFA provides funding towards childcare and travel costs whilst the young parent is engaged in a study programme. The 16 to 19 Bursary Fund provides financial support to help care leavers, students in care, or in receipt of specific benefits, to remain in education. 

Information: 2024 to 2025 new wave 4 T Levels

In February, ESFA published the indicative funding bands for the 2024 to 2025 new wave 4 T Levels. These funding bands have now been confirmed as correct, and therefore there is no change. 

You can find the funding bands and further information in the 2024 to 2025 T Levels funding guide on GOV.UK.  

Information: Get a better understanding of your individualised learner record data   

New dashboards are available from the ‘understand your funding’ tile in submit learner data (SLD). The understand your funding dashboard displays your data in one place, right up to your latest submissions. You can see totals for the current period or year to date, as well as breakdowns by funding models and student numbers.   

The new dashboards show your year-on-year performance, both funding values and learner counts. There are also dashboards showing delivery against contract values.  

There is a survey on the dashboard to help us develop the information around your needs. Provide your feedback and let us know what improvements or additions you’d like to see.    

Reminder: Traineeship individualised learner record data for starts in the 2022 to 2023 academic year – reminder to finalise data reporting

Thank you to those providers that have ensured that their individualised learner record (ILR) data for the final cohort of traineeship learners who started their traineeship on or before the Monday 31 July 2023, is correct.   

Can traineeship providers with live trainees on programme (from starts that began on or before Monday 31 July 2023), ensure that their traineeship data has been reported accurately.   

Where the programme has been completed, make sure that learners are reported as having completed the programme.