Guidance

Higher technical education skills injection fund 2: information for successful applicants

Updated 6 November 2024

Applies to England

Applications have now closed.

Successful applicants for the higher technical education (HTE) skills injection fund 2 can use this guidance for information.

The fund will help providers offer more higher technical qualifications (HTQs). This will:

• support the growth of level 4 and 5 qualifications
• ensure there are widespread credible alternatives to a 3-year degree, ahead of the introduction of the lifelong learning entitlement in 2027

The fund is for providers preparing to deliver across all 15 occupational routes up to academic year 2025 to 2026.

The HTE skills injection fund 2 has a total budget of £48.8 million, for financial years 2023 to 2024 and 2024 to 2025.

This fund consists of:

• £29.8 million for capital funding
• £19 million for resource funding

The HTE skills injection fund 2 builds on the success of:

• the HTE growth fund launched in 2021, which invested £14.5 million to support HTQs in occupational routes from cycle 1 and 2
• the HTE skills injection fund 1 launched in 2022, which has seen over £21 million of funding allocated to support all level 4 and 5 HTE qualifications in cycles 1, 2 and 3

Who the fund is for

The HTE skills injection fund 2 is for successful applicants from:

• Institutes of Technology (IoTs)
• further education (FE) colleges
• higher education (HE) institutions
• independent training providers
• consortia of eligible providers

The fund is for providers intending to deliver an HTQ.

To be eligible, at the point of application, providers met one of the following conditions:

• received an Ofsted rating of requires improvement or better
• registered with the Office for Students (OfS)

Only the lead partner in a consortium was required to meet these eligibility criteria. 

All providers within IoT applications are exempt from these eligibility criteria.

Eligible occupational routes

The qualifications providers plan to deliver must align with the timings outlined.

Originally, all qualifications that were part of cycle 1, 2 and 3 of Institute for Apprenticeship and Technical Education (IfATE) routes were within the delivery window of September 2024 and/or January 2025.

All qualifications in IfATE occupational routes for rollout in cycle 4 were due to be delivered in September 2025 and/or January 2026. A list of approved HTQs is available on the IfATE website.

However, we have now extended the delivery window to four academic years (from AY 2024/25 to AY 2027/28 for Year 1 and AY 2025/26 to AY 2028/29 for Year 2). Full details of this optional extension are below.

For year 1 providers, who began delivery from September 2024 and January 2025

You can deliver these qualifications as part of cycles 1, 2 and 3.

• digital
• construction and the built environment

• health and science

• business and administration
• education and early years
• engineering and manufacturing
• legal, finance and accounting

For Year 1 providers, who began delivery from September 2025 and January 2026

You can deliver these qualifications as part of cycle 4.

• agriculture, environmental and animal care
• catering and hospitality
• creative and design
• care services
• sales, marketing and procurement
• protective services

What the fund is for

A total of £48.8 million of funding is available to successful applicants. We have used feedback from providers to identify the areas of expenditure that will help successfully deliver level 4 and 5 HTQs.

When deciding how you will use your funding, consider how it could support the government’s priorities in boosting economic growth, as mentioned in the levelling up agenda and supporting our transition to net zero.

Funding can only be used to support the delivery of HTQs in the eligible occupational routes.

The primary beneficiary must be undertaking an HTQ, but learners doing other qualifications or apprenticeships may indirectly benefit from the fund. This is different to skills injection fund 1, where wider level 4 and 5 qualifications were included in scope.

Capital funding

A total of £29.8 million has been made available for capital funding. It must be spent on specialist equipment and perpetual software licence costs only.

The construction of new buildings is not permitted, but refurbishing existing premises is. The equipment which you spend this funding on must fulfil the criteria within your own capitalisation policy.

If your purchases meet your capitalisation policy criteria, you can use your capital allocation on whatever specialist equipment and perpetual software licence costs support your delivery of HTQs. If your software licence cost is for one year only, this would be classed as ‘resource’.

We asked you to let us know how you plan to use your capital funding, and what outcomes you expect from this expenditure, in the application form. We will monitor these outcomes.

What capital funding can be spent on

Renovation and refurbishment

This includes:

• refurbishing existing buildings
• accessibility improvements
• energy efficiency projects

Technology Infrastructure

This includes:

• upgrading IT systems and networks
• classroom technology
• student laptops or tablets
• computer labs

Specialised equipment

This includes:

• lab equipment
• vocational training equipment

Research and innovation hubs

This includes:

• innovation centres - dedicated spaces for research, collaboration, and industry partnerships.
• STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) labs and incubators

Resource funding

A total of £19 million has been made available for resource funding. This can be used across any combination of eligible categories, as fits your local needs.

We asked you to let us know how you plan to use your resource funding, and what outcomes you expect to achieve, in the application form. We will monitor your progress towards your intended spend during the funding period and offer support where required.

What resource funding can be spent on

Developing local employer partnerships to support learners

Examples of this include employers:

• supporting you with writing and delivering the curriculum
• helping to determine the specification for the equipment
• getting involved with career events and raising awareness of HTQs

Supporting and upskilling teaching and technical staff

Examples of this include:

• peer support
• attending training courses
• shadowing local employers or sector specialists
• mentoring and coaching

Supporting curriculum planning and development

Examples of this include:

• understanding sector changes and applying these to keep the curriculum up to date
• developing skill-based content and flexible delivery models (such as blended learning) to support learning and training objectives

Promoting and raising awareness of HTQs

Examples of this include events to:

• promote HTQs
• recruit learners
• transition learners successfully onto HTQs, particularly adults who may have been out of education for a while

Paying for UCAS initial registration fees

To help raise awareness, providers can use resource funding to pay for the initial fees associated with UCAS registration. Ongoing UCAS costs cannot be funded by the skills injection fund 2.

Recipients of previous funds have spent resource funding on:

• providing professional development to staff in support roles such as technician support, rather than for lecturers
• reskilling staff with one-week industrial placements
• creating digital resources for teaching to use in classrooms
• creating remote learning resources
• providing expert project management, marketing support or curriculum development

Local skills improvement fund

The local skills improvement fund (LSIF) aims to develop a local response to local skill priorities as set out in the local skills improvement plan. The HTE skills injection fund is for supporting HTQs for cycles 1 to 4.

Applications for LSIF were submitted for areas as a whole, by lead providers. If you’re in a collaboration that has been awarded LSIF funding, you could also have applied for the skills injection fund 2. However, DfE will not fund the same activities or provision twice. 

What the fund does not cover

You cannot use HTE skills injection fund 2 to:

• develop a qualification as an HTQ for submission to the IfATE approvals process
• pay teacher salaries
• pay the costs associated with getting courses validated by another organisation
• construct new buildings
• support an apprenticeship where the learner does not achieve a full HTQ at the end of their study

Funding uplifts for IoTs and providers in local skills areas

We have applied additional uplifts in funding to applications from IoTs or providers that are located in the bottom third of local authorities, as ranked by proportion of 16- to 64-year-olds with qualifications at level 3 or above. 

Local skills areas (LSAs) are the levelling up areas where the government is focusing skills-based interventions. As referenced in the skills levels of 16 to 64-year-olds by local authority analysis, they are identified according to skills levels at a local authority level.

We have applied funding uplifts to:

• IoTs – as flagship providers for science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) level 4 and 5 provision, they receive an uplift of 20%
• providers in LSAs – any provider located in one of the highlighted lower-third local authority areas in the analysis of skills levels within local authorities receives a 10% uplift
• partners in a consortium with one or more partners within an LSA at the time of application receive an uplift to their portion of the consortium funding – we have calculated the correct level of uplift, and the consortium lead partner is responsible for ensuring the LSA partners receive the additional funding

How funding has been allocated

The funding allocated to each provider is proportional to:

• the number of learners you predicted in your application form
• what type of funding you applied for (the amount of capital and resource funding as outlined earlier)
• the type of provider you are, as IoTs will receive a funding uplift
• where you are located, as providers in LSAs will receive a funding uplift

Funding per learner is capped at a maximum of:

• £8,000 for IoTs
• £7,333 for providers in LSAs
• £6,667 for all other applicants

We agreed the final allocation once we knew the full number of predicted eligible learners across all applications.

How we assessed applications

We reviewed applications against the eligibility criteria and your responses to the questions in the application form.

Information provided on the application form, including personal information, may be subject to publication or disclosure in accordance with the access to information regimes, primarily:

• the Freedom of Information Act 2000
• the Data Protection Act 2018
• the UK General Data Protection Regulations (UK GDPR)

Following receipt and review of all eligible applications to the HTE skills injection fund 2, we used predicted learner numbers from all successful applications in our funding formula to allocate the appropriate amount to each provider.

Successful applicants

If your application was successful, you will have entered into a grant agreement with us. You will have received a letter from us confirming this and setting out the terms of the grant. These are based on an amended version of DfE’s standard terms and conditions to reflect specific clauses for HTE skills injection fund 2.

The agreement confirms the funding allocation and outlines what the grant is to be used for. It also includes other conditions, including restrictions. You must demonstrate that funding spend will occur within the period we agreed with you.

We reserve the right to recover funds from you if there is evidence you have not used them for the agreed purposes or within the agreed timelines.

If you decide not to deliver an HTQ, we reserve the right to recover any grant funding we have paid according to the details given in the clawback section.

Monitoring and evaluation

Successful applicants received a grant offer letter setting out:

• what the money can be spent on
• the circumstances in which the grant would be repayable
• the monitoring and evaluation requirements

We will ask providers to submit quarterly returns so we can monitor:

• what providers have spent the funding on
• the impact it has had on building capacity
• the impact it has had on increasing quality of provision

Providers must return monitoring data and assist with an evaluation of the HTE skills injection fund 2 in terms of spend and value generated.

We will ask providers to return independent assurance of all spend. We provided further details on this through the grant offer letter.

Clawback of funds

We will monitor the spend throughout the grant period. We will ask providers to confirm actual learner numbers in September 2024 and January 2025, and September 2025 and January 2026, as applicable.

We will claw back funds if:

• funds have been mis-spent and not used in accordance with grant agreements
• funds remain unspent at the end of the grant period
• a provider does not deliver a technical Higher Technical Qualification as agreed
• a provider fails to reach 80% of their predicted learner numbers (we will claw back the difference between their actual number and 80% - for example, if they had 70% of predicted learner numbers, we would claw back 10% of funds)

This is assessed on a route-by-route basis. A provider’s total digital enrolment numbers are assessed against their total predicted digital learner numbers for a particular route.

For consortium applications, this is assessed on a provider-by-provider basis.

While we have listened to providers’ concerns about clawback in relation to previous funds, clawback is an important requirement to ensure value for money.

Updates

SIF 2 spending window extended to March 2025 

We are pleased to announce that the spending window for the Skills Injection Fund 2 (SIF 2) has been extended to 31 March 2025.

The extension provides providers with additional time to ensure that allocated funds can be used appropriately and align spend to project timelines.

 Providers will be required to submit:

• a monitoring report by 28 February 2025.
• an Annex Gi (certificate of final expenditure) by 30 April 2025

We will update the new monitoring requirements in our amended grant offer letters.

Optional four-year delivery window extension for SIF 2 funding 

-We can now confirm that SIF 2 recipients have the option to extend the delivery window to four academic years (from AY 2024/25 to AY 2027/28 for Year 1 and AY 2025/26 to AY 2028/29 for Year 2). We will take the best learner enrolment figures in a single year over the four-year period (rather than a cumulative total of learners over the four years).

This optional extension will not impact your funding allocation, or the learner enrolment figures for which you have been funded. After four delivery years, any performance below 80% will still be subject to clawback.

Providers will be able to access this opportunity by emailing the Provider Funding Team on: team.highertechnicaleducation@education.gov.uk.

We will issue new Grant Offer Letters to SIF 2 providers to explain this change. This will include monitoring and evaluation requirements for the next four years (finance returns up to the end of the spending window, final Annex Gi certificates and learner enrolment data collection).

Important dates

These dates indicate the expected timeline. We will keep providers informed of any changes to these dates.

Date	Timeline
November 2023 to March 2025	Providers spend allocated capital and resource funding and provide monitoring reports
September 2024 and January 2025	Qualifications that are aligned to IfATE occupational routes in cycle 1, 2 and 3 begin
September 2024 and January 2025	Providers confirm number of learners enrolled
September 2024 and January 2025	Providers complete and return evaluation reports detailing spend confirmation and impact of funding
28 February 2025	Providers complete and return a monitoring report
30 April 2025	Provider’s accountant or auditor submits a certificate of final expenditure (Annex Gi), on their behalf, to the department
September 2025 and January 2026	Qualifications aligned to IfATE occupational routes in cycle 4 begin teaching
September 2025 and January 2026	Providers to confirm number of learners enrolled
September 2025 and January 2026	Providers complete and return evaluation reports detailing spend confirmation and impact of funding

Contact

If you have any questions email Team.HigherTechnicalEducation@education.gov.uk.